This Element argues that a unique convergence of cultural, economic, and psychological factors created in Britain from 1789–1930 a 'golden age' of literary doodling-playful verbal and visual marking by professional authors while engaged in the labours of literary production. A prehistory outlines the doodling impulse itself, tracing its palaeolithic origins and its manifestations in the ancient, medieval, and early modern periods. The Element then considers how middle-class consumer culture, mass schooling, increasing visual literacy, and a growing psychological inwardness created fertile ground for the practice in the long nineteenth century. Through close readings of the doodles and writings of Blake, the Brontës, Thackeray, and Chesterton, this Element demonstrates that literary doodling was a significant subterranean cultural phenomenon. Studying it reveals much about the creative process, the subversive power of play, the anxieties of the modern fragmented self, and the evolving relationship between authors, readers, and material texts.