And another thing

Not so much the Mad Hatter, more the Mad Scientist now

18 August 2007

In this age of creeping censorship ‘mad’ is not a word to be used lightly. It would certainly be unlawful to use it in Kipling’s sense when he refers to frontier tribes being ‘stirred up’ by ‘a mad mullah’.

One example often cited is Roger Crab, born about 1620, who died in 1680 in his sixties. He was not mad but eccentric, and came from Buckinghamshire, as do many egregious persons. He said, not very nicely I think, ‘My mother had 20 pounds a year, otherwise my father would not have married her.’ He was one of the earliest vegans, giving up not only meat and fish but butter and cheese. He eventually graduated, through broth thickened with bran and puddings made of turnip leaves, to a mixture of dock-leaves and grass. But the only person he converted died of malnutrition. He said a flesh diet made people immoral, adding, ‘Butchers are excluded from juries. But the receiver is worse than the thief, so the buyer is worse than the butcher.’ He fought in the Parliamentary army, and ‘my skull was cloven to the brain’. Later, already known in the army as a troublemaker, he was sentenced to death by Cromwell. Indeed he was in and out of custody much of his life, chiefly for Sabbath-breaking. But he was never a member of any of the sects — Quakers, Shakers, Ranters etc — which proliferated in those noisy times. When the wars died down he set up as ‘a haberdasher of hats’ in Chesham, but sold his shop in 1651 ‘to give a considerable estate to the poor’. At Ickenham near Uxbridge, a place I used to know well, full of odd people though none of them hatters, he bought ‘a small roode of ground’ and built himself a hermitage. He wore ‘a frock of sackcloth’ and ‘no band on his neck’. The country people loved him because he could cast their horoscopes and treat their ailments with herbs and simples. He had up to 120 patients. The authorities harassed him, and he claimed that once, when they refused him food he could eat in the gaol, a dog brought him bread. There are other accounts of miraculous hands printing his tracts, including his autobiography, The English Hermite; or Wonder of this Age, being a relation of the Life of Roger Crab, originally published in 1655 and reprinted in the Harleian Miscellany. He prophesied the restoration of the monarchy, and the returning Cavaliers treated him more generously than the Puritans had, simply calling him the Mad Hatter. He died 25 years later in an odour of sanctity, and was buried in Stepney Parish Church. It is a pity he is not to be found in Aubrey’s Brief Lives, as there is a shortage of authentic anecdotes about this courageous, learned, kindly, obstinate, smelly, odd but unquestionably sane man. Instead he is immortalised and caricatured in Alice.

Today a more apposite figure than the Mad Hatter is the mad scientist. I have rather lost faith in scientists as a group. The Royal Society behaves more as a public relations agency for the Greens than an institution dedicated to objective truth, and the holder of the Chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University appears to assert, in his book promoting militant atheism, that no true Christian is or can be a good scientist. As a result, all kinds of journalistic hobbledehoys are putting out stuff saying there is no God, and the supply of clever teenagers taking science at school is dwindling. We live in the age of the Mad Scientist’s Tea Party, and what gets talked about there makes Alice’s experiences seem credible, indeed prosaic. Scientists still claim to rule the intellect but the lessons they teach erode confidence — as the Gryphon said, ‘The reason they’re called lessons is because they lessen from day to day.’