Mad Hatter Day: The Tea Party in the Book Was on May 4
Woody Magazine
We write the things that aren't news
Oct. 6, 2026 (Tue.)
It's Mad Hatter Day. The Tea Party in the Book Was on May 4
The "10/6" on the Hatter's hat was never a date. It was a price. Lewis Carroll hid the real date of the tea party somewhere else.
In Three Lines
- Mad Hatter Day falls on Oct. 6 because Americans read the "10/6" on the Hatter's hat as a month and a day.
- Carroll explained in 1890 that it meant ten shillings and sixpence. The hat on the Hatter's head was stock he meant to sell.
- The book gives the tea party its own date. Alice says it is the fourth, and the month is May: the real Alice Liddell's birthday.
In John Tenniel's drawing, a small card sticks out of the band of the Hatter's tall hat. It reads "In this style 10/6." The picture first appeared with "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" in 1865.
That card is all over social media today. In the United States, where the month comes first, 10/6 looks like Oct. 6. Anyone would read it that way. Holiday calendars say a group of computer technicians in Boulder, Colo., turned it into Mad Hatter Day in 1986. They all repeat the same account, and none of them points to a record from that year.
One detail before going further: the book never calls him the Mad Hatter. He is simply the Hatter. The madness comes from the Cheshire Cat, who points Alice toward the Hatter and the March Hare and tells her, "they're both mad."
The card was a price tag
In Victorian Britain, a pound was 20 shillings and a shilling was 12 pence. People wrote shillings and pence with a slash between them, so ten shillings and sixpence became 10/6. Twenty-one shillings made a guinea, which put the Hatter's hat at exactly half a guinea.
Some holiday guides read the card differently. In their version it is a customer's order, tucked into the band so the hatter remembers which style to make. He makes hats for a living, so the explanation sounds tidy.
Carroll settled the question himself. In 1890 he published a retelling for children "from nought to five" called "The Nursery Alice." Describing the tea-party picture, he wrote that the Hatter carried hats around to sell, and that even the one on his head was for sale. That, Carroll explained, is why it shows a 10 and a 6.
"Wasn't that a funny way of selling hats?" — Lewis Carroll, "The Nursery Alice" (1890)
The original book makes the same point. At the trial in Chapter 11, the King orders the Hatter to take off his hat. "It isn't mine," the Hatter says. "Stolen!" the King cries. "I keep them to sell," the Hatter explains. "I've none of my own. I'm a hatter."
Most of us have walked out in a new shirt and found the tag still hanging from the sleeve hours later. The Hatter wears his tag on purpose. The hat on his head is the shop window.
The back pages of "The Nursery Alice" give a sense of the price. In a later, cheaper printing of that book, Macmillan's list prices "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" at 6 shillings with gilt edges and at 2 shillings and sixpence in the People's Edition. The Hatter's hat would buy four People's Edition copies, with sixpence to spare.
The book already picked a date
A fair objection is that the tea party takes place outside time, so any date will do. The Hatter fell out with Time, and ever since it has been six o'clock, always teatime. But Carroll did put a date in the scene.
At the end of Chapter 6, on her way to the March Hare's house, Alice reasons that "as this is May it won't be raving mad." In Chapter 7, the Hatter pulls out his watch, shakes it, holds it to his ear and asks what day of the month it is.
Alice thinks for a moment and says, "The fourth." The Hatter sighs: "Two days wrong!" His watch shows the day of the month but not the hour.
May 4 was the real Alice's birthday. Alice Liddell was born on May 4, 1852. Her father was dean of Christ Church, the Oxford college where Carroll taught mathematics. The book never mentions the birthday. It leaves May in one chapter and the fourth in the next.
The Hatter was not in the first version of the story, either. Carroll gave Alice a handwritten manuscript, "Alice's Adventures Under Ground," in 1864. The published book ran nearly twice as long. According to a University of Michigan Library exhibit, the Hatter and the March Hare were among the characters he added. The British Library's record of the manuscript marks "A Mad Tea-Party" as a new chapter. Carroll put Alice's birthday into a scene he wrote for the book.
Dates into money, money into a date
The book even stages today's mix-up in reverse. At the trial, the King asks the Hatter when the tea party began. "Fourteenth of March, I think it was," the Hatter says. The March Hare says the fifteenth, and the Dormouse says the sixteenth. The jury writes all three dates on their slates, adds them up and reduces the answer to shillings and pence.
Carroll's jury turned dates into money. More than a century later, readers turned money into a date. The Hatter sat at his tea table with the price tag still on, and we read the tag as a birthday card. The birthday was in the book all along. It was May 4.
Sources
- Source ↗ Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865), Project Gutenberg
- Source ↗ Chapter 11, Lit2Go edition, University of South Florida
- Source ↗ Lewis Carroll, "The Nursery Alice" (1890), Project Gutenberg (People's Edition)
- Source ↗ University of Michigan Library, "Publishing the First Edition"
- Source ↗ British Library, "Alice's Adventures Under Ground" manuscript (Add MS 46700), catalog record
- Source ↗ Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, "What could you buy with a working class wage?"
- Source ↗ "Alice's Recollections of Carrollian Days," The Cornhill Magazine, July 1932
- Source ↗ National Day Calendar, "National Mad Hatter Day"
댓글
댓글 쓰기