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

The Well of Loneliness: a novel by Radclyffe Hall

 

Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943) was a British poet and novelist who is best remembered for her fifth novel “The Well of Loneliness”, published in 1928. This was the first English novel to openly describe lesbian relationships. It led to an obscenity trial and a 20-year ban in Great Britain. It was also banned in the United States, but for a much shorter period.

The novel is the story of Stephen – a girl whose aristocratic father wanted a son and whose mother is frightened by her boyishness. She hates wearing dresses, has a series of passionate crushes on older women, and declares herself an “invert”, which was the term used by the sexologist Havelock Ellis to describe homosexuality.

Stephen drives an ambulance during World War I and finds love with Mary Llewellyn. When the war is over, the two women move to Paris and throw themselves into what would now be called gay and lesbian culture. However, happiness is impossible for them and their lifestyle is described by the novelist as being tragic and self-destructive.

The book was prosecuted by the British Home Office under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act. During the trial, Hall received support from several noted writers including Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Rebecca West, Arnold Bennett and EM Forster. Despite the book describing no behaviour more explicit than kissing, the mention of the protagonists “not being divided” when spending the night together was probably enough to lose the case for the author.

Copies of the novel were sold in Paris and smuggled back to Britain, so it got a fairly wide readership. Reviews were generally positive and Hall received a large number of letters and telegrams of support. It was a bestseller in the United States and was selling around 100,000 copies a year internationally by the time of Hall’s death from cancer in 1943.

The Well of Loneliness was, for many years, the best known lesbian novel in the world. The attempts to ban it only increased its visibility and created greater awareness of female homosexuality. Even today – when the book’s attitudes and language seem dated and its message depressing – it still provokes discussion and academic debate and features in accounts of coming out.

© John Welford

Matthew Lewis: author of "The Monk"

 

Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818) was a writer known to the literary world solely for one novel, The Monk, which appeared in 1796. This novel made such a dramatic impression that Lewis is often referred to simply as “Monk Lewis”.

The fashion for what became known as Gothic horror was born at the end of the 18^th century thanks mainly to the work of Ann Radcliffe, whose novels included The Mysteries of Udolfo (1797) which was satirised by Jane Austen in her early novel Northanger Abbey.

Lewis was undoubtedly the most skilful of Radcliffe’s imitators, although the Monk is very different in tone to her novels. He incorporated elements of Shakespearean and Jacobean drama, German Romanticism, folklore, the writings of the Marquis de Sade and Samuel Richardson’s “Clarissa”. He abandoned all restraint in his violent tale of ambition, murder and incest, set in a Spanish Monastery.

The protagonist, Ambrosio, struggles to balance monastic vows with his personal ambitions, giving way to temptation and committing sexual crimes which he covers up with murder. He falls victim to the Inquisition and is sentenced to death. He finally makes a pact with the Devil and ends up being hurled to damnation.

This sensational mixture of the supernatural and the carnal, so daring in its treatment of sexual fantasy and violence, was, unsurprisingly, extremely popular when it was published, although it attracted accusations of obscenity. Lewis was forced to tone it down when the third edition was published.

The Monk could scarcely be regarded as great literature, but it was powerfully written and contained powerful insights into criminal psychology and erotic neurosis. By going so extravagantly over the top with the carnage and horror, Lewis made it perfectly clear that his novel belonged firmly in the realms of fantasy.

Monk Lewis earned his place in literary history for his originality, but he will never be regarded as anything more than an entertainer.

© John Welford

Alexander Pushkin

 

Alexander Pushkin was, by common consent, Russia’s greatest poet. He was also the heroic ideal of the Romantic poet.

He was born in 1799 into a noble Russian family. Brilliant and precocious, his first poetry was published at the age of 14. His romantic narrative “Ruslan and Ludmila”, written six years later, was a runaway success and was recognised as breaking every literary convention of its day.

He displayed huge energy and drive that had the effect of transforming Russian literature. He did this by rejecting the traditional constraints of religion and censorship to create highly original works.

He revolutionised the way Russians thought about their history and drama, and especially the way they thought about their writers.

Among his best-known works was “Eugene Onegin”, written between 1825 and 1832, this being a verse novel that is regarded by some as the finest Russian novel ever written. It was a decisive move away from the allegorical tradition and towards the realism later displayed by writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Nabokov.

Pushkin was a radical in political as well as literary terms. He sympathised with the aims of the aristocratic set known as the Decembrists, who conspired to reform the oppressive autocracy of the Tsars. These sympathies attracted the attention of the autocrats and led to Pushkin’s exile from St Petersburg to some of the more remote parts of Western Russia. In 1825 he had to look on from the outside as a Decembrist uprising was put down and his generation’s dreams of liberty were smashed.

However, Pushkin was allowed back into imperial favour when Tsar Nicholas I made promises of reform that turned out to be less than promised. His radicalism was still very much to the fore, which meant that he fell increasingly out of favour at court. He wanted to retire to a life of literary seclusion, but this escape was denied him. The result was that he gave way to drinking and gambling.

One reason why Pushkin was not allowed to leave the court was that he had married an extremely beautiful woman named Natalya. By flirting with several of the men about the court, including the Tsar himself, she had unwittingly encouraged lustful ambitions that she had no intention of satisfying.

One of these would-be suitors was a French social climber named George d’Anthes. After insulting her in public he challenged Pushkin to a duel, and his challenge was accepted. Pushkin was fatally wounded, dying two days after the event at the age of 38.

The nature of Pushkin’s death, at such a young age, only served to cement his reputation as a Romantic icon. He has therefore gone down in literary history as the epitome of creativity triumphing over the dead hand of bureaucracy and philistinism.

© John Welford

Northanger Abbey, a novel by Jane Austen

 

The bulk of Jane Austen’s novels were revised for publication a considerable time after they were first written, and it is often impossible to tell how much rewriting was involved in the revision.

‘Northanger Abbey’ was originally written in 1797 and 1798, finally being finished in 1803. It was only published posthumously in 1818 (along with ‘Persuasion’), and it was therefore the first complete novel to have been written despite the appearance of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility’ several years previously.

‘Northanger Abbey’ is the story of Catherine Morland, a somewhat ordinary girl, goodhearted and rather simple, who spends some weeks in Bath with friends of her family and makes various friends and acquaintances while there.

She meets Henry Tilney and his sister. Catherine falls in love with Henry and is invited to the Tilney’s family home under Henry’s father’s impression that she is a wealthy heiress who would make a good match for his son. The house – Northanger Abbey – is an old abbey building that Catherine expects to be just like the ancient ghost-ridden buildings that she has read about in the Gothic horror novels - particularly those of Ann Radcliffe – that were very popular at the time.

Things go wrong for Catherine when Henry’s father discovers that she is not a rich heiress after all and throws her out. However, everything works out all right eventually and the hero and heroine end up happily married.

The plot might sound dull enough, but the novel is far from dull, despite Jane Austen’s refusal to use any of the more violent contemporary novelistic devices in order to enliven it. The life of the novel comes from the combination of wit and profound sense of the meaning and interest of the events of daily life in the social world that Jane Austen knew so well.

Although the irony is somewhat cruder than that produced by Jane Austen in her later novels, it is always carefully poised and well directed. The tone is not burlesque or mock-heroic, and a note of affectionate understanding runs together with the irony.

It is noticeable that although Jane Austen pokes affectionate fun at Catherine’s ridiculous romantic expectations of a haunted house, this is only done to emphasise that real life can be every bit as interesting and enjoyable.

Catherine’s actual romance with Henry is not expressed in the passionate tones of later romantic novelists, but it is nonetheless sensitive and true.

One thing we can learn from this novel is that Jane Austen truly understood how young people come to fall in love, realising exactly the degree to which Nature imitates Art and the varying parts played by admiration, gratitude and vanity.

‘Northanger Abbey’ is rarely regarded as one of Jane Austen’s best novels, and it is only fully appreciated by those who have a basic knowledge of the Gothic horror tradition at which she pokes gentle fun, but it is certainly worth a read.

© John Welford

Jack and Jill: a nursery rhyme explained

 

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.

Up Jack got and down he trot,
As fast as he could caper;
He went to bed and covered his head
With vinegar and brown paper.

 

There have been several proposed explanations of this familiar nursery rhyme, and everyone is free to choose which one they consider most likely.

One suggestion is that Jack and Jill are King Louis XVI of France and his Queen, Marie Antoinette. Louis certainly ‘broke his crown’ by being executed in 1793, and Marie Antoinette’s head did indeed come tumbling after thanks to the guillotine. The poem was first published in 1795, so in this respect at least the dates do match.

The villagers of Kilmersdon in Somerset think that they have the answer, due to a tragedy that occurred in 1697. A young couple did their courting up a hill, away from the prying eyes of the local gossips. Jill became pregnant, but just before the baby was born Jack was killed when a rock fell off the hill and landed on his head. Jill died in childbirth only a few days later.

Another possibility is that it has to do with the attempt by King Charles I to reform taxation on alcohol. Having been prevented by Parliament from raising the duty, he reduced the measures by which alcohol could be served. One of these measures was the half pint, known as a Jack, and the quarter point, known as a Gill. Charles reduced both the Jack and the Gill, while keeping the prices exactly the same, thus gaining his duty increase by the back door.

But perhaps the true explanation is even older, namely an ancient Norse tale concerning a young brother and sister named Hjuki (pronounced Juk-ee) and Bil. The moon god caught them on a dark night as they were stealing a pail of water from the Bygrir Well. They were promptly spirited away to the moon, where Scandinavians have long supposed that they can be seen carrying a bucket of water attached to a long pole.

So which one of these theories – if any – do you think is most likely to be the true origin?

© John Welford