What to Do When You’ve “Got the Morbs”

“Got the morbs” shows up to delight us every couple of years, but the dictionary where it comes from is a treasure trove.

James Redding Ware was a 19th century British novelist best known for creating (pseudonymously, as Andrew Forrester) one of the first female detectives in fiction—the mysterious Miss G—who bursts onto the scene in the rather unsubtly titled The Female Detective. Miss G (sometimes called Miss Gladden) was making brilliant deductions from far too little evidence more than 40 years before Sherlock Holmes got his start in A Study in Scarlet and almost 70 years before the first Miss Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage, which makes Ware an important early figure in the relatively short history of detective fiction. But nowadays, Ware is far better known for a single 11-word entry in his final piece of writing, a posthumously published dictionary of Victorian London slang called Passing English of the Victorian Era:

Got the morbs - Temporary melancholia. Abstract noun coined from adjective morbid.

The revelation that some number of gloomy Victorians were trudging around in dingy London back alleys complaining of “the morbs” is so delightfully on the nose that this passage goes viral every couple of years when Ware’s dictionary is…