Top hats – a most impractical invention

I imagine most of the male characters in my new novel ‘Mr Blackwood’s Fabularium’ to be wearing top hats.

The fact that top hats retained their popularity for so long is odd. In the eighteenth century men wore tricorn hats, which are said to have been the most aerodynamically efficient hats ever designed. (The harder the wind blew, the more it jammed the hat down on the wearer’s head.) The top hat, by contrast, must have been a nuisance both on and off. A gust of wind would easily have dislodged it, so the wearer must have spent a lot of time clutching the brim.

And then there was the question of what to do with the hat when the wearer was indoors. There is a wonderful episode in Great Expectations where the blacksmith, Joe Gargery, visits his newly gentrified brother-in-law, Pip, and spends most of the visit trying to balance his new top hat on the mantelpiece and leaping up every time it threatens to fall off into the hearth.

The railway companies came up with an ingenious solution to the problem in the form of parallel ribbons tacked to carriage ceilings a little less than a hat brim’s width apart. Hats were inserted between the ribbons and hung down from the roof like bats from the rafters.

The most famous of all Victorian top hats: Brunel’s