It was the day when an annual saturnalia of vulgar vice usurps and pollutes the open downs at Epsom. Bertram did not care to see it, he said— the rabble of a great town turned loose to desecrate the open face of nature— even regarded as a matter of popular custom; he had looked on at much the same orgies before in New Guinea and on the Zambesi, and they only depressed him:
Grant Allen. The British Barbarians
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go to Epsom, the place where they last changed horses, see the postilions and try if anything could be made out from them.
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice (1813)
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"At Epsom races, a matter of over twenty years ago, I got acquainted wi' a man whose skull I'd crack wi' this poker, like the claw of a lobster, if I'd got it on this hob.