The original Mad Hatter

 

One of the best-known characters in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” is the Mad Hatter, with whom Alice takes tea together with his companions the March Hare and the Dormouse.

By the time that Alice in Wonderland was published in 1865 it was well known that people who made hats often fell victim to an illness that displayed early symptoms of what could be termed madness, such as irritability, a lack of patience, difficulty in thinking or concentrating, and changes in movement, which could become coarse or jerky.

These symptoms resulted from long-term mercury poisoning, which was an occupational hazard for hat makers who used a form of mercury to treat felt. When used in an enclosed space, the mercury gave off vapours that were then inhaled. The expression “mad as a hatter” became commonly used in Victorian England and would have been well known to readers of “Alice”.

However, it seems highly likely that Carroll had a real person in mind – not a hatter – as his model for the Mad Hatter character.

This was Theophilus Carter, a well-known furniture dealer who lived near Oxford and, like the Mad Hatter in Tenniel’s illustrations for “Alice”, always wore a top hat.

Carter was renowned for his eccentric ideas and inventions. At the 1851 Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace built in London’s Hyde Park, he exhibited his ‘alarm clock bed’, a contraption that woke the sleeper by literally throwing him out of bed at a pre-determined time – an idea that, very much later, also occurred to Nick Park, the creator of the stop-motion characters Wallace and Gromit.

Not only would Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) have seen Carter’s invention at the exhibition, he would also have been familiar with the latter’s presence around the streets of Oxford, which was where he lived.

The prevalence of furniture in the Tea Party episode – the table, the writing-desk and the armchair, as well the fascination with time, also point to a strong connection with Theophilus Carter.

© John Welford

The Adventure of the Empty House: a Sherlock Holmes story

 

The Adventure of the Empty House was first published in the Strand Magazine in October 1903 and later collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1905. Arthur Conan Doyle had “killed off” his famous detective Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem, published in 1893, and finally gave way to public pressure to bring him back from the dead, which he did in this story.

Conan Doyle had been genuine enough in his desire to put an end to the Sherlock Holmes stories, due to his exhaustion in thinking up new adventures for his hero and wishing to have more time for other work, but he was perhaps fortunate that his method of dispatching Holmes was one that allowed for an escape, which he was therefore able to bring to fruition when the “resurrection” took place. It has sometimes been suggested that this was always Conan Doyle’s intention, but that does sound unlikely given his comments at the time.

The Story

The Adventure of the Empty House begins with Dr John Watson relating the strange murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair. The young aristocrat was a pleasant young man whose only vice was that of playing cards, sometimes for money, although he never gambled more than he could afford to lose.

On the evening of his murder, Adair had returned at 10 pm to his home on Park Lane, London, where he lived with his mother and sister. He had gone to his room on an upper floor and locked the door. When his mother came home she found that he would not answer a knock at the door and eventually had the door forced open, where Adair is found to be dead having had part of his head blown off by an expanding bullet.

There were no weapons in the room, and no indication that anyone but Adair had been in the room. The window was open, but the drop to the flowerbed below was at least 20 feet and there was no sign of any disturbance on the ground outside. If anyone fired a gun from the street it would surely have been heard by people on busy Park Lane, but this was not the case.

Adair had been sitting at a table where it appears that he had been totting up his winnings and losses at cards, but all the sums were modest and did not suggest that anyone in his social circle would have a motive to murder him.

The case was one that puzzled many people, including Dr Watson, who clearly took the view that this would have been one that Sherlock Holmes would have been intrigued by. As the story opens, Watson is standing outside the house, looking up at the window of the room where the crime took place, and trying to think as he knew Holmes would have done.

As he turns away he bumps into an old man who is standing nearby and knocks some books out of his hands. Watson picks up the books and attempts to apologise as he hands them back, but the old man hurries away.

When Watson gets home, he is visited soon afterwards by the same old man, who apologises for his earlier brusqueness. The man suggests he might be able to offer him some books to fill a gap on Watson’s shelves, which Watson promptly turns to look at. When he turns back, he is amazed to see that the old man is in fact Sherlock Holmes who has just removed his disguise.

When Watson recovers his senses, having fainted with the shock, Holmes tells him how he had survived the incident that had apparently caused his death three years previously. As related in The Final Problem, Holmes had encountered his arch-enemy Moriarty on a narrow path above the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. The two fought and Moriarty slipped and fell to his death. Holmes had other enemies and he decided that it would help him to catch them if everyone thought he had died as well. He therefore climbed up a steep rock-face and hid in a crevice while Watson and the local police searched for him in vain, concluding that Holmes and Moriarty must have fallen together and their bodies been washed down the river.

Just as Holmes thought he was out of danger a huge rock tumbled past him. He looked up to see one of Moriarty’s associates, Colonel Sebastian Moran, who clearly knew that Holmes was still alive.

There now followed a period of three years in which Holmes adopted a variety of aliases and disguises as he toured the world acting as a secret agent for the British government. The only person, apart from Moran, who knew that Holmes was not dead was his brother Mycroft who was instructed to keep paying the rent for Holmes’s lodgings in Baker Street.

Holmes only returned to London when he heard about the murder of Ronald Adair, as it sounded to him like the work of Sebastian Moran. He can see a way of flushing out his old enemy and bringing him to justice. He has set up a scheme to achieve his goal, and he is now going to put it into action, taking Watson with him.

He leads Watson through some obscure back streets to the rear of an empty house which, to Watson’s surprise, fronts on to the opposite side of Baker Street from the old lodgings at 221B. From the front window Watson can see what appears to be Holmes himself, silhouetted in an upstairs window. Holmes explains that this is actually a wax decoy that their former landlady, Mrs Hudson, is moving around at intervals so that it appears to be more lifelike.

After several hours waiting in darkness they hear someone entering the house and approaching the room. They hide themselves away and watch as a man converts a cane into a rifle, takes careful aim across the street and fires it, hitting the wax dummy. Holmes and Watson tackle the man to the floor, Holmes blows a whistle, and Inspector Lestrade and two policemen arrive to arrest the gunman who is, of course, Colonel Sebastian Moran.

Holmes explains that the rifle used by Moran was made for him by a German mechanic such that it would fire expanding bullets with almost no sound. This was therefore the weapon used to kill Ronald Adair, and Moran can thus be prosecuted for his murder.

But what could have been Moran’s motive for killing Adair? Holmes explains that the two of them had been gambling partners and that they had been winning at cards because Moran had been cheating, which Adair had only recently realised. Adair must have threatened to expose Moran, but because Moran’s livelihood depended on gambling, he had killed Adair to keep him quiet. At the time of his death, Holmes supposes, Adair had been working out the sums of money he needed to repay the players who had been cheated.

Does the story hold water?

The point of the story is to re-introduce Sherlock Holmes to Conan Doyle’s demanding readers, by providing both an adventure story and an explanation of how Holmes survived the encounter with Moriarty and what he had been doing in the interim. There is therefore not all that much in the way of Holmesian detection in the story. The clever part is the setting of the trap into which Moran falls.

But there would seem to be some elements that do not work particularly well. It is clear that Holmes has taken his brother into his confidence, due to having absolute trust in Mycroft’s ability to keep a secret. Mycroft has presumably agreed to keep paying the rent on 221B Baker St in the expectation that Holmes would return at some stage, but everyone else who knew Holmes, such as Inspector Lestrade, would be convinced that the former tenant was dead, so would it not seem odd for the rooms to remain empty for a whole three years? What possible reason could there be if the original tenant was not expected to return?

A more troubling aspect of the story, surely, is the instruction given to Mrs Hudson to keep moving the wax dummy to give the impression that it is Holmes himself. Clearly Mrs Hudson has been told that Holmes is alive, but what explanation could there possibly be for this strange instruction other than that it is intended to be shot at instead of the real thing? Would you really want, as a landlady, to be expected to handle an object that somebody might fire a gun at at any minute? Would Holmes really have put Mrs Hudson into a position of such danger?

And is it not remarkable that Colonel Moran should decide to try his luck and see if there happened to be an empty house immediately opposite his target from which he could fire his rifle? Why not fire from the street, as he had done to murder Ronald Adair?

And how did Colonel Moran know that Sherlock Holmes was back in London when Holmes had kept the secret from absolutely everybody? Had Moran spent time wandering up and down Baker Street on the off-chance of spotting Holmes’s profile in the window?

Why would Holmes know that Moran would choose this precise moment to make his attack? There must be a reason, because otherwise Holmes could not have arranged for Lestrade and the two policemen to be on hand to make the arrest.

There are certainly a few things that do not seem to add up in this story!

© John Welford