Derby Day

Published in 1975, this short illustrated social history describes the Epsom Derby as a nineteenth-century English institution rather than as a single race meeting. Holloway follows the day from the road out of London to the Downs: carriages and railway crowds, bookmakers, pickpockets, picnic parties, and the mixing of fashionable society with the holiday poor. He sets the race in the calendar of Victorian leisure and notes how painters and journalists recorded the scene. The book is a brief essay on a national outing, not a chronicle of winners or a manual of the Turf. Its subject is the crowd and the occasion as much as the horses.

Bound in glazed paper, printed in colour. Brown endleaves, No jacket or slipcase. Folio miniature -michael Joseph in association with the Folio Press.