Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who lived in England in the late 1700s and early 1800s, is mostly remembered for his writing – long poems like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. He was eccentric, even for a member of the 18th century British intelligentsia. Among other things, he came up with his own scheme for a utopian society, which he called “Pantisocracy” (from a Greek word meaning “equal government”). Some people actually tried it for a while.
Some today speculate that if the diagnosis “bipolar” had been around at the time, it might well have been applied to him. When he set out to write something, he worked at it single-mindedly. One might even say “obsessively.” Nobody would have called him obsessive during his lifetime, though. That’s because the word “obsess,” which was adopted from Latin around the 1400s, for some reason disappeared, and was considered obsolete around Coleridge’s time. It was only revived in the mid 1800s. Oddly enough, Coleridge’s lifetime (1772 to 1834) corresponded pretty closely with the temporary disappearance of “obsession.”
Since he didn’t have “obsess” available, Coleridge had to come up with an alternative. Like any self-respecting eccentric British intellectual, he came up with something interesting and slightly odd. What he came up with first appeared in an 1895 letter: “I never had the scribblo-mania stronger on me, than for these last three or four days.“
“Scribblomania,” the word Coleridge coined, caught on among English writers. Everybody else used it as “scribblemania” rather than “scribblo-mania,” but they all agreed that it meant the intense urge to write. The Brontë sisters used it repeatedly: “I am just going to write because I cannot help it. Branwell might indeed talk of scribblemania if he were to see me just now” (Charlotte Brontë).
Aside from authors, it was never been a particularly popular word, and it didn’t fare very well in the 20th century. If anything, we’re more familiar with obsession now than ever — but of course now we’ve recovered the use of the word “obsession.” You can still find “scribblemania” occasionally, and it seems to have become mostly associated with the Brontës, not with Coleridge: “Our three girls, in a burst of Brontë-like scribblemania, started writing stories and letters for each other” (2005).
I suppose it’s an open question whether Coleridge or the Brontës were more afflicted by “scribblemania.” It’s also an open question of who might have been more likely to catch “Scrabblemania” if the game had been invented in their time.
