What does the idom "Mad as a Hatter" mean? and what is the origin?

Answer 1

The origin of the proverbial expression "mad as a hatter" is uncertain. It may derive from:

Robert Crab, a 17th century eccentric who gave all his goods to the poor and lived on leaves and grass.

Mercury poisoning suffered by many hatters in the 18th century and 19th century, when mercury was used in the manufacture of felt. Absorption of mercury through the skin can cause Korsakoff's syndrome. These hatters so afflicted were also known as mad hatters.

An adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon word atter meaning poison, closely related to the word adder for the poisonous Crossed Viper. Lexicographers William and Mary Morris in Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (1977) favour this derivation because "mad as a hatter" was known before hat making was a recognized trade.

Lewis Carroll used the phrase for the character of The Hatter in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. This character is also known as The Mad Hatter.

These days we associate mad as a hatter with a bit of whimsy in Lewis Carroll’s famous children’s book Alice in Wonderland of 1865. Carroll didn’t invent the phrase, though. By the time he wrote the book it was already well known; the first example I can find is from a work by Thomas Chandler Haliburton (Judge Haliburton), of Nova Scotia, who was well-known in the 1830s for his comic writings about the character Sam Slick; in The Clockmaker; or the Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville of 1836, he wrote: “Father he larfed out like any thing; I thought he would never stop—and sister Sall got right up and walked out of the room, as mad as a hatter”. As the author felt no need to explain it, by then it was clearly well known in his part of North America. Whether it was invented there, I don’t know, but it seems likely. An early British reference is in Pendennis by William Makepeace Thackeray, serialised between 1848-50: “We were talking about it at mess, yesterday, and chaffing Derby Oaks—until he was as mad as a hatter”.

Note, by the way, that mad is being used in both these cases in the sense of being angry rather than insane, so these examples better fit the sense of phrases like mad as a wet hen, mad as a hornet, mad as a cut snake, mad as a meat axe, and other wonderful similes, of which the first two are American and the last two from Australia or New Zealand. But Thomas Hughes, in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, used it in the same way that Lewis Carroll was later to do: “He’s a very good fellow, but as mad as a hatter”.

Few people who use the phrase today realise that there’s a story of human suffering behind it; the term actually derives from an early industrial occupational disease. Felt hats were once very popular in North America and Europe; an example is the top hat. The best sorts were made from beaver fur, but cheaper ones used furs such as rabbit instead.

A complicated set of processes was needed to turn the fur into a finished hat. With the cheaper sorts of fur, an early step was to brush a solution of a mercury compound—usually mercurous nitrate—on to the fur to roughen the fibres and make them mat more easily, a process called carroting because it made the fur turn orange. Beaver fur had natural serrated edges that made this unnecessary, one reason why it was preferred, but the cost and scarcity of beaver meant that other furs had to be used.

Whatever the source of the fur, the fibres were then shaved off the skin and turned into felt; this was later immersed in a boiling acid solution to thicken and harden it. Finishing processes included steaming the hat to shape and ironing it. In all these steps, hatters working in poorly ventilated workshops would breathe in the mercury compounds and accumulate the metal in their bodies.

We now know that mercury is a cumulative poison that causes kidney and brain damage. Physical symptoms include trembling (known at the time as hatter’s shakes), loosening of teeth, loss of co-ordination, and slurred speech; mental ones include irritability, loss of memory, depression, anxiety, and other personality changes. This was called mad hatter syndrome.

In the 18th century, mercury salts were used to make felt for fancy hats. The process required copious amounts of the element, a substance then not known to be as dangerous as we now know it to be.

Hat makers who day after day handled mercury-soaked fabric risked mercury poisoning, a condition that affects the nervous systems. Those so exposed would in time develop uncontrollable twitches and trembles, making them appear demented to the casual observer.

Even though there exists a strong tie between mercury poisoning and strange behavior in those long-ago hatters, it's still more than likely the term we now toss about so casually did not spring from this combination. Phrases such as mad as a March hare, mad as a buck, mad as Maybutter, and mad as a wet hen are older than mad as a hatter, leaving open the conclusion that hatter is but a variation of an existing term. (Interestingly, these other phrases pull in different directions, with mad as a March hare signifying odd or eccentric behavior, while mad as a wet hen characterizes anger.)

Whatever the definitive origin of mad as a hatter, we know the term wasn't coined by Lewis Carroll in his 1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The saying turns up in Thackeray's 1849 Pendennis and Thomas Chandler Haliburton's 1837 The Clockmaker.

Carroll's "hatter" might well have been modeled on Theophilus Carter, an eccentric furniture dealer who characteristically sported a top hat. Carter was neither a hat maker nor had been exposed through his work to mercury fumes — if he had indeed been Carroll's inspiration for the "Mad Hatter" of Alice, it would have been because he was a somewhat nutty real-life character much given to the wearing of highly noticeable hats. There also exists a possibility Carroll was unaware of the mercury connection to the existing saying. It's also possible he had not previously encountered the saying and thus thought he had coined it himself.

Carroll's Alice is replete with word play. He loved to twist words, and encoding double and triple meanings into his work was for him part of the fun. His Mad Hatter could therefore be a caricature of Theophilus Carter, a real person of his acquaintance, while his mad as a hatter could have been a twist on the pre-existing saying, mad as a March hare. Those familiar with Alice will recall that the March Hare was the constant companion of the Mad Hatter.

Moreover, mad at that time had more than a few meanings: "off the rocker" and "angry," but also "venomous," which suggests yet another twist in the game. According to 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'.
Supporting the "adder" theory comes this snippet 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.
A sharp-eyed reader spotted this very early sighting of "mad as an adder" in an 1842 publication:


He was as mad as a striped adder.
Whether Carroll meant his "hatter" as a caricature of a known crackpot, a play on mad as a March hare, as a bit of tomfoolery about venomous vipers, or as a combination of all three, it seems clear that the only relation his use of the term had to mercury-maddened hat makers was that of coincidence.

Answer 2

Meaning

Completely mad.

Origin

Mercury used to be used in the making of hats. This was known to have affected the nervous systems of hatters, causing them to tremble and appear insane. There is a theory that this is the source of the phrase.

The documentary evidence doesn't support that idea though. The earliest known printed citation is in Thomas Haliburton's 'The clockmaker; or the sayings and doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville', 1835:

"And with that he turned right round, and sat down to his map and never said another word, lookin' as mad as a hatter the whole blessed time."

Haliburton uses the term again later in the story, but there's no explanation of it to surmise any sort of derivation from. He seems to either have made it up or to have known his readers would be already familiar with it.

Answer 3

Actually, it did not start with Lewis Carroll. The hatters of Victorian England (and before that, for all I know) used chemicals in their work that were psychoactive. (No, I don't know which ones.) So they were all a little mad, or more than a little, due to the fumes they inhaled. That's why Lewis Carroll created the Mad Hatter character.

Answer 4

Crazy
Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass
Alice in Wonderland

Answer 5

[Q] From A Hansen: “Can you enlighten me about the origins of mad as a hatter?”

[A] These days we associate mad as a hatter with a bit of whimsy in Lewis Carroll’s famous children’s book Alice in Wonderland of 1865. Carroll didn’t invent the phrase, though. By the time he wrote the book it was already well known; the first example I can find is from a work by Thomas Chandler Haliburton (Judge Haliburton), of Nova Scotia, who was well-known in the 1830s for his comic writings about the character Sam Slick; in The Clockmaker; or the Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville of 1836, he wrote: “Father he larfed out like any thing; I thought he would never stop—and sister Sall got right up and walked out of the room, as mad as a hatter”. As the author felt no need to explain it, by then it was clearly well known in his part of North America. Whether it was invented there, I don’t know, but it seems likely. An early British reference is in Pendennis by William Makepeace Thackeray, serialised between 1848-50: “We were talking about it at mess, yesterday, and chaffing Derby Oaks—until he was as mad as a hatter”.

Note, by the way, that mad is being used in both these cases in the sense of being angry rather than insane, so these examples better fit the sense of phrases like mad as a wet hen, mad as a hornet, mad as a cut snake, mad as a meat axe, and other wonderful similes, of which the first two are American and the last two from Australia or New Zealand. But Thomas Hughes, in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, used it in the same way that Lewis Carroll was later to do: “He’s a very good fellow, but as mad as a hatter”.

Few people who use the phrase today realise that there’s a story of human suffering behind it; the term actually derives from an early industrial occupational disease. Felt hats were once very popular in North America and Europe; an example is the top hat. The best sorts were made from beaver fur, but cheaper ones used furs such as rabbit instead.

A complicated set of processes was needed to turn the fur into a finished hat. With the cheaper sorts of fur, an early step was to brush a solution of a mercury compound—usually mercurous nitrate—on to the fur to roughen the fibres and make them mat more easily, a process called carroting because it made the fur turn orange. Beaver fur had natural serrated edges that made this unnecessary, one reason why it was preferred, but the cost and scarcity of beaver meant that other furs had to be used.

Whatever the source of the fur, the fibres were then shaved off the skin and turned into felt; this was later immersed in a boiling acid solution to thicken and harden it. Finishing processes included steaming the hat to shape and ironing it. In all these steps, hatters working in poorly ventilated workshops would breathe in the mercury compounds and accumulate the metal in their bodies.

We now know that mercury is a cumulative poison that causes kidney and brain damage. Physical symptoms include trembling (known at the time as hatter’s shakes), loosening of teeth, loss of co-ordination, and slurred speech; mental ones include irritability, loss of memory, depression, anxiety, and other personality changes. This was called mad hatter syndrome.

It’s been a very long time since mercury was used in making hats, and now all that remains is a relic phrase that links to a nasty period in manufacturing history. But mad hatter syndrome remains common as a description of the symptoms of mercury poisoning.