2) The Tea Party

While it’s not a character, there is a theory that Carroll used the tea party as a metaphor using real life scenarios. In the Victorian era a tea party was considered a therapeutic activity for insane asylum inmates, of which his uncle, Robert Wilfred Skeffington Lutwidge, was charged with helping.

Via/ Wiki Commons

Mental illness had gone from being treated as a spectacle of dangerous proportions (as in Bethlam Asylum AKA Bedlam) to an infirmity which often meant the afflicted were treated as children.

Doctor Hugh Welch Diamond was a friend of Lutwidge and the three exchanged ideas and conversations on numerous occasions. Diamond used photography to record his female patients and hopefully record something about their mental illnesses that in-person diagnosis had missed.

Dr. High Diamond Welch. Via/ Wiki Commons

Diamond was also instrumental in forming the Royal Photographic Society in England, though his aims differed wildly from the adventures and zoologists who populated the club’s ranks for many years. Diamond was a keen photographer, just like Carroll, and the two bonded over this new method for creating art and documenting reality in a more objective way and the two no doubt spent time discussing with Lutwidge the merits and deficits of the then-current system for managing the mentally ill.

1) The Mad Hatter

There have been multiple theories over the years on who exactly was the inspiration for the Mad Hatter character.

Via/ Wiki Commons

Some say it was either Theophilus Carter (whose name was put forth in 1931 by the Reverend W. Gordon Baillie) or Thomas Randall. Carter was an Oxford area furniture seller, but his name was only proffered 60 years after Carroll’s book was published. Randall on the other hand, was a tailor and hosiery seller near Oxford who commonly called himself a hatter and was known to many since he eventually became the mayor of Oxford.

Theophilus Carter in 1894. Via/ Wiki Commons

Many people assume that the madness of the hatter was due to mercury poisoning (a chemical common in the making of hats at the time), while others have drawn a link between Carroll’s uncle and the tradesmen who inevitably end up in the pauper’s asylum. However, the crazy characteristics of the Hatter do not line up with mercury poisoning, the results of which are anxiety, shyness, seclusion, and loss of confidence.

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