My hero the Hatter is a stoic, subversive and much maligned tea drinker continuously subjected to unfair and prejudiced ill treatment.
The Hatter’s exact origins are unknown but it is widely accepted that he was born in the English city of Oxford to a middle-class family. His father, believed to have been a renowned hatter, encouraged his son’s interest in acting. The Hatter’s father passed away shortly after his sixteenth birthday, an experience that let to well document bouts of depression. (As a tribute to his late father, the label on the Hatter’s hat reads, ‘In this style 10/6’ – ‘10/6’ meaning 10 shillings and six pence (or a half guinea), the price of the hat in pre-decimalised British money and acts as a visual indication of the hatter’s trade and hence a reference to his beloved father). In 1864 the Hatter finally hat [sic] his big break when English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson cast him as a character in his forthcoming novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The rest, as they say, is history. However, following his rise to fame the Hatter cut an increasingly isolated figure and sought a life away from the limelight of popular culture.
Possibly due to the fact that the Hatter was generally referred to as ‘Mad Hatter’ (a term believed to have been derived from the phrase ‘mad as a hatter’, although others attribute it to the Hatters dabbling with drugs, particularly opium, while yet more people believe it derives from his time spent in his father’s workshop, inevitably inhaling mercury fumes said to be the cause of serious neurological damage, including confused speech and distorted vision), the Hatter worked hard to distance himself from the public eye. Even though his role in Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was met with great fanfare, it was not well received by critics, being regarded as self indulgent. His post acting life was as an artist and a keen gardener.
The Hatter is my hero because of his love for everything tea, his quirky sense of fashion and, of course, his hat. He was (in my opinion wrongfully) accused of murdering time, when all he tried to do was sing a song for the Queen of Hearts. He was further victimised at Alice’s trial for ‘being nervous’ – in this writer’s humble opinion, the most unjust and contemptuous allegation ever made. His love for poetry and riddles is well documented, both of which provide us with a glimpse of his tender and playful nature. More than anything, though, the Hatter is my hero for being a mild mannered, misunderstood tea connoisseur who has done more for the aromatic beverage that is tea than anyone else in the world.
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