Cоntents intrоductiоn chapter I. The life and work of Lewis Carroll

Mad as a Hatter, Mad as a March Hare
The phrases ‘mad as a hatter’ and ‘mad as a march hare’ were also common in Carroll’s time.
‘Mad as a hare’ alludes to the crazy capers of the male hare during March, its rutting season.
‘Mad as a hatter’ probably owes its origin to the fact that hatters actually did go mad, because the mercury they used sometimes gave them mercury poisoning (Gardner, “Annotated Alice” 90).
However, there’s another theory about the origin of the phrase ‘mad as a hatter’ (snopes.simplenet.com):
[…] ” here’s the entry for ”‘Mad as a Hatter’ refers to madness or hatters” in the 1980 A Dictionary of Common Fallacies:
Lewis Carroll with his penchant for linguistic games presumably knew perfectly well that his “Mad Hatter’ meant ‘a venomous adder’, but since his readers may have been misled by Tenniel’s drawings, it should be pointed out that ‘mad’ meant ‘venomous’ and ‘hatter’ is a corruption of ‘adder’, or viper, so that the phrase ‘mad as an atter’ originally meant ‘as venomous as a viper’. Here’s a much older citation of the same strip from a 1901 book:
“In the Anglo Saxon the word ‘mad’ was used as a synonym for violent, furious, angry, or venomous. In some parts of England and in the United States particularly, it is still used in this sense. ‘Atter’ was the Anglo Saxon name for an adder, or viper. The proverbial saying has therefore probably no reference to hat-makers, but merely means ‘as venomous as an adder.’ The Germans call the viper ‘Natter.'” Edwards’s Words, Facts, and Phrases.
In simpler terms, “mad as a hatter” was a play on words (with “adder” becoming “hatter”). Though the mercury hatters crazy explanation appears to fit the term, it fits only retrospectively at the time Carroll coined the phrase, “mad” meant “venomous,” not “insane.” “
The Dormouse
Victorian children apparently actually had pet dormice, and kept them in old teapots filled with grass or hay. The Dormouse from Alice in Wonderland may have been modelled after Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s pet wombat, which had a habit of sleeping on the table. Carroll knew the Rossetti’s and occasionally visited them (Gardner, “Annotated Alice” 95).
Another possibility is that the Dormouse was inspired by Thomas Jones Prout. Prout was a Fellow of Christ Church from 1842, a Tutor from 1851 to 1861 and a Censor from 1857 to 1861, and lived at Christ Church for sixty seven years. Prout was known for falling asleep in meetings, and apparently also had an interest in Frideswide’s well (the treacle well): according to the inscription on the well head, he had it rebuilt in 1874. (National Portrait Gallery)
The Mad Tea Party
In Victorian times, asylums opened their doors for ‘therapeutic entertainment’: events would be organized, including tea parties, that were open to visitors. It was thought to help with the resocialisation of the patients, and it was a form of entertainent for the visitors. So the mad tea party scene may actually refer to a tea party with asylum clients!
Carroll must have been aware of this practice, especially because his uncle Robert Wilfred Skeffington Lutwidge was a Commissioner for the Commission in Lunacy, a state supervised body for the inspection of lunatic asylums in Britain and Ireland. He appears to have visited such an asylum at least once.
As there were straw beds in some asylums, this may also explain the practice of drawing people with straw in on their heads (in this case, the March Hare’s head) to signify them being mad (Kohlt, “The stupidest Tea Party” and Kohlt, “Alice in the asylum”).
Melanie Bayley (Bayley) believes that the Mad Tea Party is a reference to the work of mathematician William Rowan Hamilton:
“His discovery of quaternions in 1843 was being hailed as an important milestone in abstract algebra, since they allowed rotations to be calculated algebraically.
Quaternions belong to a number system based on four terms. Hamilton spent years working with three terms one for each dimension of space but could only make them rotate in a plane. When he added the fourth, he got the three dimensional rotation he was looking for “It seemed (and still seems) to me natural to connect this extra-spatial unit with the conception of time.”
Where geometry allowed the exploration of space, Hamilton believed, algebra allowed the investigation of “pure time”, a rather esoteric concept he had derived from Immanuel Kant that was meant to be a kind of Platonic ideal of time, distinct from the real time we humans experience. Other mathematicians were polite but cautious about this notion, believing pure time was a step too far.
The parallels between Hamilton’s maths and the Hatter’s tea party or perhaps it should read “tparty” are uncanny. Alice is now at a table with three strange characters: the Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse. The character Time, who has fallen out with the Hatter, is absent, and out of pique he won’t let the Hatter move the clocks past six.
Reading this scene with Hamilton’s maths in mind, the members of the Hatter’s tea party represent three terms of a quaternion, in which the all important fourth term, time, is missing. Without Time, we are told, the characters are stuck at the tea table, constantly moving round to find clean cups and saucers.
Their movement around the table is reminiscent of Hamilton’s early attempts to calculate motion, which was limited to rotatations in a plane before he added time to the mix. Even when Alice joins the party, she can’t stop the Hatter, the Hare and the Dormouse shuffling round the table, because she’s not an extra spatial unit like Time.
The Hatter’s nonsensical riddle in this scene “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” may more specifically target the theory of pure time. In the realm of pure time, Hamilton claimed, cause and effect are no longer linked, and the madness of the Hatter’s unanswerable question may reflect this.
Alice’s ensuing attempt to solve the riddle pokes fun at another aspect of quaternions: their multiplication is non-commutative, meaning that x × y is not the same as y × x. Alice’s answers are equally non-commutative. When the Hare tells her to “say what she means”, she replies that she does, “at least I mean what I say that’s the same thing”. “Not the same thing a bit!” says the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
When the scene ends, the Hatter and the Hare are trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot. This could be their route to freedom. If they could only lose him, they could exist independently, as a complex number with two terms. Still mad, according to Dodgson, but free from an endless rotation around the table.”