Climbing aboard the stamp bandwagon

The expression ‘stampmania’ made its debut in British newspapers in 1860 as a pithy journalistic phrase to explain the perceived mental derangement that drove schoolboys to collect worthless used postage stamps and to exchange their duplicates with similarly afflicted fellow scholars in assemblies or on school playing fields, in preference to maiming each other on rugby pitches or re-enacting Britain’s bloody battlefield glories in their schoolyards. Two years later many of the same boys had progressed to gainful employment as lowly clerks and messenger boys in City of London offices; but newspapers continued to report some of their out-of-office behaviour as deranged.

For example, the informed its readers, in April 1862, that: ‘a congregation of boys in the neighbourhood of Birchin Lane and Change Alley has formed a Post Office Stamp Exchange for the barter and sale of cancelled foreign postage stamps. This mania has nothing to do with the rage for collecting huge numbers of ordinary Great