Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Whippersnapper

Just the other day I was bemoaning that I didn't have the energy I once had when I was a young whippersnapper. Well, you can probably guess what happened next!
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I recalled my grandmother (and mother) calling overly energetic children whippersnappers. Thinking about it now, I wondered if the word evolved from stagecoach days, from drivers snapping their whips when they wanted their horses to speed it up.

Sounds reasonable, right?

But I was wrong!

According to the Phrase Finder:

... 'Whipper snappers' were known by various names, all of them derived from the habit of young layabouts of hanging around snapping whips to pass the time. Originally these ne'er-do-wells were known simply, and without any great linguistic imagination, as 'whip snappers'. This term merged with an existing 17th century term for street rogues - 'snipper snappers', to become 'whipper snapper'. Christopher Marlowe mentions 'snipper snapper' in the 1604 edition of The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus, when referring to a 'hey-pass', which is what street jugglers were known as in Marlowe's day.

But I'll seeke out my Doctor... O yonder is his snipper snapper... You, hey-pass, where's your master?

The meaning of 'whipper snapper' has altered over the years, originally referring to a young man with no apparent get up and go, to be applied to a youngster with an excess of both ambition and impudence.

Okay, so when did the snipper-snapper and whip-snapper merge into whippersnapper? And when did the definition do a one-eighty, from "no ambition" to "too much ambition?" Because if I'm using one version in my fiction when the earlier version applied... or using it before it even existed... Well, better to find out now than never.

I used ngram to pull up some 19th century references, and found this in Gossip by Henry Morley, from 1859:

This passage definitely uses the word in the more modern sense: young, foolish, full of energy. So, I'm safe in having my 1880s characters growl over those foolish young whippersnappers.

When I think of the term "whippersnapper," I think of this.
The Old Stage-Coach of the Plains (1901) by Frederic Remington [Public domain]