Explaining Idioms: 5) Mad as a Hatter

 

If you are 'mad as a hatter' then you are completely 'bonkers' (crazy). You might have 'lost your marbles' (which means you've 'lost your mind') or you might have gone 'round the bend' (gone crazy). We can explain these different idioms some other time. In this post, I'll just try to explain 'mad as a hatter'.

If you want to know what a hatter is: it is someone who makes hats. When everyone used to wear hats, like during the Victorian Age (roughly 1837 - 1901), you needed people to make all those hats. They were called hatters. Another word for this profession is 'milliner', which I think is a much nicer word.

Why were hatters mad? Well, the Victorian hatters used mercury (水银/汞) and this gave them mercury poisoning (汞中毒) which in turn gave them dementia (失智症).

Now, not all hatters would have got dementia but enough of them must have been badly affected by the mercury used in their factories (工廠) to make it commonly known that hatters could, just by making hats for years and years, go mad.

The famous Mad Hatter from Lewis Carrol's 'Alice in Wonderland'

By the time Lewis Carrol came to write his famous children's book Alice in Wonderland, the idea of hatters being mad was well established. Since the book has become so popular and there have been successful film adaptations, the image of the Mad Hatter has stuck, until the phrase 'mad as a hatter' and the character from the book are difficult to separate.

The phrase was in use 50 years before Carrol's book came out though. Nowadays there are still other references to mad hatters, such as in versions of Batman.

Batman's enemy, the Mad Hatter, from one of the comic books.

This Batman character was so obsessed with Lewis Carrol that when he went mad, he became a mad hatter.

Another version, from the cult '60s TV series 'Batman'.

When I was little the famous version of the mad hatter was the one in Disney's 1951 animated feature Alice in Wonderland. To me, he doesn't seem insane, maybe just eccentric (古怪).

 

Nowadays, I wonder if more children would recognise Johnny Depp's version of the Mad Hatter, who I think seems really, truly mad.