When was the expression "or something" first used?

What evidence of sentences ending with "or something" recorded ANYWHERE from 1800-1900 including in England, and what are the earliest written attestations during the 19th century in any of the U.S, England or Australia?

For example, after a road rage incident someone might say: "Were you TRYING to hit me or something?"

I need to know for dialogue in creative writing whether it's believable and not using too much creative licence. I couldn't find anything helpful from a Google search because of difficulty wording the search for search results. I'd be amazed and grateful if I can get a rough 'timeline' of notable uses such as 1800's books. "Old Worldian English' (Neo-Victorian) to my ear sounds poetic compared to "Late Modern English" and is used to great effect in Advance Australia Fair. "Old World" in Australia is a poetic term for the art style of postcards, sepia tone photographs, newspaper fonts, book covers, etc of the era 1800-1930-ish, as in the real estate expression "old world charm".

Solution 1:

Your intuition that ending a sentence with "or something ." is rather modern is confirmed by the following query to Google ngrams: It was certainly used in 1800, but only rarely, and it took off in the last quarter of the 19th century. For a more detailed search, some of the available corpora of Late Modern English (e.g., CLMET3.1 may help you finding quotations and judging their "notability".