Methodology

How this site was built, and the honesty rules it follows.

Editorial method

1. Primary texts first. Every quotation is taken from the published texts of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), plus Carroll’s 1896 preface. Quotations are verbatim, with book and chapter cited.
2. Scholarship second. Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice and standard Carroll biographies supply the riddle history, the name decodings, and the publishing record.
3. Uncertainty labeled. Competing theories (the phrase’s origin, the Carter legend) are presented with attribution and an explicit verdict: proven, plausible, or unsubstantiated.
4. No invented biography. Carroll gives the Hatter no birthplace, age, or family; this site invents none.

Quotation policy

• Verbatim means verbatim — including Carroll’s 1896 “very flat” italics and the restored “nevar” spelling, flagged as an editorial restoration.
• “A Very Merry Unbirthday” is never presented as Carroll’s; it is labeled as Disney’s 1951 invention wherever it appears.
• “We’re all mad here” is the Cheshire Cat’s line, not the Hatter’s; this site does not misattribute it.

Image policy

• All imagery is original AI-generated dramatization art in a consistent storybook style — a tall-hatted Hatter with price tag, wild hair, and waistcoat.
• Every displayed image is labeled: “AI-generated dramatization art — not a historical depiction.”
• No real people are depicted. No historical photographs are faked. Tenniel’s illustrations are described, never reproduced.
• The Vizlings character sheet was a private style reference only and is never displayed.
• Full inventory: the image credits on this page.

The stream

Checking

This site ships with an automated QA suite (route coverage, one H1 per page, meta descriptions, alt text, internal links, canonical/OG URLs, riddle wording, honesty labels, image provenance) that must pass fully before any report of completion. The build is static HTML — no trackers, no cookies, no accounts.