Victorian Monkey Business

Blogger John Brownlee at Table of Malcontents recounts a discussion with his friend Stacey.

"Our topic was monkeys. After several hours of monkey-centric conversation, Stacey dropped this bombshell: 'When I was in school, my professor told me about this Victorian hat craze. It apparently became fashionable at a certain point for ladies to wear wide brimmed hats, on top of which tiny monkeys lived. But because no one wanted a tiny chattering monkey crapping all over their fashionable hat, they wouldn't feed the monkeys: they'd just starve to death. Ladies would replace their monkeys once a week. By the end of the London season this entire species of monkey had been made extinct.'

"My eyes lit up. Oh, I knew the story was too good to be true: how is a monkey crapping on your hat any less disturbing than a week spent enduring its shrieking starvation cries? Still, Stacey was emphatic that she had actually been told this by a reputable professor. It was 2 a.m; we immediately woke several of her old classmates up, demanding that they groggily corroborate. No one remembered the story. We even spent an hour combing Google for corroboration. By the time we were ready to admit defeat, we'd exhausted all possible search terms, including 'Lady Monkey No Crap Hat.'"

All right, Peeper readers: can anyone find a factual basis for this story?