Alice and the Mad Tea Party

About this story

A Mad Tea-Party is Chapter 7 of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the 1865 novel by Lewis Carroll, the pen name of the Oxford mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Alice joins the Hatter (Carroll calls him simply the Hatter), the March Hare and a sleepy Dormouse at a table where it is always six o'clock. This version keeps the chapter's best jokes in order, from the raven riddle and the buttered watch to the treacle well, and trims some of the back-and-forth so it fits a bedtime.

Tips for telling it

• Give each guest a clear voice: a snappy Hatter, a flippant Hare, and a Dormouse who sounds half asleep.
• Pause after Why is a raven like a writing desk? and let your child invent an answer; nobody at the table has one.
• Point out the wordplay: I see what I eat and I eat what I see use the same words but mean different things.

Questions people ask

What chapter is the Mad Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland?

It is Chapter 7, titled A Mad Tea-Party, in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). It follows Alice's meeting with the Cheshire Cat, who warns her that the Hatter and the March Hare are both mad.

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

In the book nobody knows, not even the Hatter. Carroll later admitted the riddle had no answer, and in the preface to an 1896 edition he offered a joke one: because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat.

Why is it always six o'clock at the Mad Tea Party?

The Hatter says he quarrelled with Time at the Queen of Hearts' concert, when the Queen shouted that he was murdering the time. Ever since, it has stayed six o'clock, so it is always teatime and they move round the table to find clean cups.