He turned right round, and sat down to his map and never The expression appears again (twice) soon afterwards, in a book by the Canadian author Thomas Haliburton - The clockmaker or the sayings and doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville, 1835: TICKLER (aside to SHEPHERD.): He's raving. NORTH: Many years - I was Sultan of Bello for a long period, until dethroned by anĪct of the grossest injustice but I intend to expose the traitorous conspirators XL1V, in a fictional conversation between a group of characters that wouldn't have been out of place in Wonderland: It appears in a section of the magazine headed Noctes Ambrocianæ. The earliest known printed citation of the phrase that I know of is from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, January-June 1829. The circumstantial evidence is rather against the millinery origin though and, beyond the fact that hatters often suffered trembling fits, there's little to link hat making to the coining of 'as mad as a hatter'. That could be enough to convince us that this is the source of the phrase. The use of mercury compounds in 19th century hat making and the resulting effects are well-established - mercury poisoning is still known today as 'Mad Hatter's disease'. A neurotoxicologist correspondent informs me that "Mercury exposure can cause aggressiveness, mood swings, and anti-social behaviour.", so that derivation is certainly plausible - although there's only that circumstantial evidence to support it. Of hatters, causing them to tremble and appear insane. This was known to have affected the nervous systems Mercury used to be used in the making of hats. Mad hatters existed before Lewis Carroll put one into Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but no one is sure how this 19th century expression originated. This is now commonly understood to mean crazy, although the original meaning is unclear and may have meant annoyed.
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