Who inspired such madness?

Academic debate is growing about who was the real-life inspiration for the Mad Hatter, dreamed up 151 years ago by Christ Church don Charles Dodgson (1832-1898), otherwise known as Lewis Carroll.

Oxford writer Mark Davies, author of Alice in Waterland (Signal Books 2010), writing in The Times Literary Supplement (May 2013), raises the notion that he was none other than a prominent Oxford shop-keeper and one-time mayor of the city called Thomas Randall (1805-1887): a High Street tailor who also sold hats.

The intriguing theory threatens to overturn another claimant who has long been front-runner for the accolade, namely Theophilus Carter (1824-1904).

He was listed as the son of a college servant in the 1851 census, a “porter/cabinet maker” living off Oxford’s High Street who, on grounds of eccentricity alone, would appear to fully qualify for the “Mad” bit of the title: he was mentioned in correspondence on the letters page of The Times in 1931, as the inventor of an alarm clock bed, unveiled at the Great Exhibition of 1851, that could overturn itself and tip its occupant out at a pre-selected time.

But what about the “Hatter” bit?

Another correspondent to The Times, The Rev. W. Gordon Bailie, (also writing in 1931; that is 80 years after the Great Exhibition), supplied that: “All Oxford called him [Carter] the Mad Hatter. He would stand at the door of his furniture shop ... always with a top hat at the back of his head, which, with a well-developed nose and a somewhat receding chin, made him an easy target for the caricaturist.”

Seemingly good claims on both counts there, except that Mr Davies (from whom I gather all this information), has discovered that there is no evidence at all that Carter did indeed dream up the alarm clock bed; his name is not mentioned in the Great Exhibition catalogue, nor are there any other documents pertaining to this revolutionary Great British invention.

And, of course, he was not really a “Hatter”. On top of that, Mr Davies writes in the TLS: “There is not the slightest evidence of any connection between Carter and Dodgson, nor with the real Alice (1852-1934), the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, Henry Liddell.”

His own candidate however, Thomas Randall, was known to her. She mentions him in her recollections of childhood published in the Cornhill Magazine of July 1932 — 70 years after that “golden afternoon” of July 4, 1862, when Dodgson first decided to write down what eventually became Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — a decision taken following a rowing trip down the river to Godstow with Alice, her two sisters Lorina and Edith, and fellow parson the Rev Robinson Duckworth.

Randall, who lived in Grandpont House, that mansion standing on arches over a stream near Folly Bridge, from where the boatload of girls and parsons set out that afternoon, did describe himself as a “hatter”.

But did he qualify as “Mad”? Perhaps only in so far as he let students run up insane debts at his shop.

Mr Davies writes that Randall was one of 64 creditors at the 1847 bankruptcy hearing of Worcester College student Edward Jennings who was assessed as possessing only a silver pencil worth three shillings, but had liabilities of more than £2,200.

The magistrate decided that it was not reasonable to expect Jennings to resist “every species of credit proffered for every species of extravagance”.

The Times encouraged its readers to “heartily rejoice” at the verdict, describing Oxford shopkeepers as “trade harpies”.

Poor Mr Randall, “hatter”, was singled out for particular opprobrium for providing credit at his “ruination shop”.

What madness. I encourage all Alice fans to buy Mr Davies’s book.