"Cockney" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Barrington: for the uninitiated to understand their modes of expression, is as impossible as for a Buxton to construe the Greek Testament. To sport an Upper Benjamin, and to swear with a good grace, are qualifications easily attainable by their cockney imitators; but without the aid of our additional definitions, neither the cits of Fish-street, nor the boors of Brentford would be able to attain the language of whippism. We trust, therefore, that ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... plain truth, my dear Mrs. M—-, my art (she was English, and cockney, and dreadfully mangled the letter h whenever it stumbled into a speech) is in ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... rich, but she had never plundered the poor. Her greatest conquest—and that when she was a woman of forty—was the monarch of this very country which now lay crushed under the Kaiser's heel. For a few months he had taken a whimsical liking to her handsome face, well-preserved figure, and amusing cockney talk. But he had employed her rather as the mistress of his menus plaisirs, as his recruiting agent. He had rewarded her handsomely. Now it was all in the dust: her beautiful Villa Beau-sejour a befouled barrack for German soldiers. ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... next morning, the cockney as usual, taking the lead. One man followed him, but kept losing ground purposely, merely keeping the leader in sight; the others did the same. Before the last man had lost sight of the camp, he could see Spiller in the distance walking towards it. He then uttered a long ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... anxiously scanning the windows of the cars. Drawn up at the curb behind them was a smart two-seated phaeton, with a pair of clean-limbed bays. The driver was not a negro, as is usually the case in the South, but a tight-faced little man, who looked the typical London cockney that he was. ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... Others again, take the train for a day's outing and play quoits, rounders, lawn tennis, and the like; the sportsman, perhaps, preferring his gun and his dog; families, again, are picnic-mad, for your colonist can rival the Cockney any day for making his holiday in the country. It may be to 'the rocks' he goes to watch his youngsters paddling in the rolling tide, or to the toil of clambering up the 'dim mountain,' which seems to suit their hardy lungs better than the shade of the 'fern glen,' and a journey of eighteen miles ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... our cockney lads, more of a patriot than a linguist, looked at this for a moment and then lampblacked a big sign of his own, which he raised ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... a terrible Cockney, Sir Henry,—found it very cold, and was very sulky. The only man I cared to see in Scotland was at the Lakes; but I kept a register of events, which is now on the table in my dressing-room. If Graeme will read it, for I am but a stammerer, it is ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... but every one expected as their right (for a preacher was nothing then who could not prove himself "a good Latiner"); and graced, moreover, by a somewhat pedantic and lengthy refutation from Scripture of Dan Horace's cockney horror of ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... to the dance hall, closed at this hour to its nocturnal patrons, where she knew she would find Tom Martin in the office back of the main room. He was there as she expected—a keen-eyed, sharp-featured little cockney whose history from the time he disappeared from London in a fog to the day when he emerged in this unlikely corner of the great United States would have made a thrilling story—particularly to the English police! Through the open ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... judgment of the cockney who buttered his horse's hay, the ragged boy skinned her mice and plucked her sparrows in my absence. The consequence was her untimely end. I was met by my landlady with many a melancholy "Ah, sir!" and actually the good ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... an over-dressed, showy individual a shade more of a cockney than himself, interposed with ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... we owe to the facetious pen of Mr. Hood, our artist has not been so successful. There is here too much horsemanship and not enough incident for him; but the portrait of Roundings the huntsman is an excellent sketch, and a couple of the designs contain great humor. The first represents the Cockney hero, who, "like a bird, was singing out ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fun! Until the procession arrived the policemen were really obliging in that way. The one nearest me was as fat as Falstaff, and a slim young Cockney in front kept addressing intimate remarks to him and calling him Robert. The young impudence himself was just as ridiculous, for he wore a fringe which was supported by hair-oil and soap, and rolled carefully down the right side of his forehead so that he could always keep his ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... cockney's prefix of the letter h to innocent words beginning with a vowel having its prototype in the speech of the vulgar Roman, as may be seen ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... went up from the Germans, any of whom looked big enough to eat the small man. Dick pushed nearer to the group. He knew the chap now—he was a little Cockney Jew, a bookmaker, horse-dealer, and what not, scarcely the kind of chap to be expected to show pluck and patriotism, yet these are often met with in the most unexpected places. There he stood, opposite a German big enough to eat him and in fluent Cockney he proceeded ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... of his soul. It stands patiently waiting to be found, knee-deep in orchards of Kent or mirrored in pools of Lincoln; and when the man sees it he remembers it, though he has never seen it before. Even I have been forced to confess this at last, who am a Cockney, if ever there was one, a Cockney not only on principle, but with savage pride. I have always maintained, quite seriously, that the Lord is not in the wind or thunder of the waste, but if anywhere in the still small voice of Fleet Street. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... green baize door I could hear the continuous torrent of invective, broken at first by protest, later on by soft exclamations of surprise, and finally—oh, the relief of that moment!—by an uncontrollable explosion of laughter. The Cockney mind is keenly alive to humour, and when a racy Irishwoman gets fairly started on a favourite subject, the delicious contradictions of her denunciations are hard to beat! That laughter saved the situation, and the domestic wheels began ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... makes one forget the very sweet voices that also exist in America. The Southern voice is very low in tone and soothing, like the "darkey" voice. It is as different from Yankee as the Yorkshire burr is from the Cockney accent. ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... sentimental-looking cockney was devouring a very crossed epistle which he pressed to his lips whenever any one looked at him; while a host of others satisfied themselves by reading in a kind of buzzing undertone, every now and then interrupting themselves with some broken exclamation as commentary,—such ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Donne he favoured with hints about his extreme meagreness, allusions to his turned-up nose, cutting sarcasms on a certain threadbare chocolate surtout which that gentleman was accustomed to sport whenever it rained or seemed likely to rain, and criticisms on a choice set of cockney phrases and modes of pronunciation, Mr. Donne's own property, and certainly deserving of remark for the elegance and finish they communicated ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... home just before midnight, her mind was made up. Her husband had always insisted that the children should be well fed and healthy. He had spoken with a countryman's contempt of the meagre Cockney bodies around them. One at least should go. She lit the candle, and stood listening to their sleep. Suddenly the further question came—which of the four? Should it be Alfred, the child of her girlhood, already so like ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... early childhood—he was seven years old in the year in which his father was able to see the new St. Wilfred's an edifice complete except for consecration—it seemed to him that his education had centered in the prevention of his acquiring a Cockney accent. This was his mother's dread and for this reason he was not allowed to play more than Christian equality demanded with the boys of Lima Street. Had his mother had her way, he would never have been allowed to play with them ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... often heard "Point Judith" mentioned by the New-Yorkers, as the Cockney voyager talks of Sea-reach, or the buoy at the Nore; and here it was close under our lee,—a long, low point of land, ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... of which two are supported horizontally on the branches of the trees, and a third planted perpendicularly in the ground. These cimeaux are intended as a sort of treacherous invitation to the birds to come and rest themselves. So regularly as Sunday morning arrives, the Marseillais Cockney installs himself in his pit, arranges a loophole through which he can see what passes outside, and waits with all imaginable patience. The question that will naturally be asked, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... among the mass in New England, than it is anywhere else in this country, at this very moment. One leading New York paper, edited by New England men, during the last controversy about the indemnity to be paid by France, actually styled the Due de Broglie "his grace," like a Grub Street cockney,—a mode of address that would astonish that respectable statesman, quite as much as it must have amused every man of the world who saw it. I have been much puzzled to account for this peculiarity—unquestionably one that exists in the country—but ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... "The Disappointed Dinner Party." R.W. Buss. A scene of cockney mortification humorously treated.—An unlucky Londoner and his tawdrily-dressed wife, appeared to have toiled up the hill, with their family of four children, to a friend's cottage, the door of which is opened by an old housekeeper, with "Master's out," while the host himself is peeping ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... in its way, as prolific of contrasts as any part of the United States. There is certainly no more cultivated centre in the country, and yet the letter r is as badly maltreated by the Boston scholar as by the veriest cockney. To the ear of Boston centre has precisely the same sound as the name of the heroine of Wagner's "Flying Dutchman," and its most cultivated graduates speak of Herbert Spencah's Datar of Ethics. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... or the Footman's Miscellany. 1732. A rhyme in the motto on the title-page shows what a Cockney ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... processes going on within the building, the results of which are shewn in 'Cocoa Paste,' 'Rock Cocoa,' 'Eating Vanilla Chocolate,' 'Penny Chocolate,' 'French Bonbons,' 'Flaked Cocoa,' 'Homoeopathic,' &c. So numerous are the sorts, that a purchaser is as much puzzled in his choice as an untravelled Cockney with a Parisian bill of fare. The making of the flaked cocoa is peculiarly interesting, and is, we were informed, peculiar to this establishment. To see how the amorphous mass comes from the mill in long curling ribbons, uniform in thickness and texture, is a sight that provokes astonishment, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... newspaper correspondent, who imagines that a letter to the 'Times' is the ultimate remedy for all the evils to which flesh is heir. Dickens's early novels, said Fitzjames, represented an avatar of 'chaff'; and gave with unsurpassable vivacity the genuine fun of a thoroughbred cockney typified by Sam Weller. Sam Weller is delightful in his place; but he is simply impertinent when he fancies that his shrewd mother wit entitles him to speak with authority upon great questions of constitutional reform and national policy. Dickens's ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... ought really not to abuse Scotland in the pleasant way he so often does in the sylvan shades of Enfield; for Scotland loves Charles Lamb; but he is wayward and wilful in his wisdom, and conceits that many a Cockney is a better man even than Christopher North. But what will not Christopher forgive to genius and goodness! Even Lamb, bleating libels on his native land. Nay, he learns lessons of humanity even from the mild malice of Elia, and breathes a blessing ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... went out on this particular evening for a solitary ramble amongst the quiet Surrey suburbs, in any lonely lanes or scraps of common-land where the speculating builder had not yet set his hateful foot. It was a lovely evening; and I, who am so much a Cockney as to believe that a London sunset is one of the grandest spectacles in the universe, set my face towards the yellow light in the west, and walked across Wandsworth Common, where faint wreaths of purple mist were rising from the hollows, ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... of any species of the simia genus. In general symmetry of body and limbs they were infinitely superior to the orang outang; so much so, that, but for their long wings, Lieutenant Drummond said they would look as well on a parade ground as some of the old Cockney militia.... These creatures were evidently engaged in conversation; their gesticulation, more particularly the varied action of their hands and arms, appeared impassioned and emphatic. We hence inferred that they were rational ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... than oaths at Trumpington, And Ditton girls are mean and dirty, And there's none in Harston under thirty, And folks in Shelford and those parts, Have twisted lips and twisted hearts, And Barton men make cockney rhymes, And Coton's full of nameless crimes, And things are done you'd not believe At Madingley on Christmas Eve. Strong men have run ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... dwelt all the year round in the midst of his own people, was to be examined by the minister, whose native tongue, like that of his flock, was Gaelic, and who was as awkward and ineffectual, and sometimes as unconsciously indecorous, in his English, as a Cockney is in his kilt. It was a great occasion: the keen-eyed, firm-limbed, brown-cheeked little fellows were all in a buzz of excitement as we came in, and before the examination began every eye was looking at us strangers as a dog looks at his game, or when seeking it; they ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... would have kept his promise, though he saw that the keepers gave ground, finding Cockney skill too much for their clumsy strength; but at last Harry Verney, who had been fighting as venomously as a wild cat, and had been once before saved from a broken skull by Tregarva, rolled over at his very feet with a couple of ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... hair, who entered the parlor to wait for further accessions from the hotel. They were on their way with a band of music to give some popular citizen a surprise-party. The popular citizen never got the fine edge of that surprise. I took it off for him. If it were not too much like a little Cockney on Vancouver's Island who used the phrase on all occasions, from stubbing his toe to the death of a Cabinet Lord, I should say, "I never was more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... literature of a sunless Decadence has spread widely, by virtue of its own uncleanness, and its leading characteristics are gloom, ugliness, prurience, preachiness, and weedy flabbiness of style. That it has not flourished in Great Britain, save among a small and discredited Cockney minority, is due to the inherent manliness and vigour of the national character. The land of Shakespere, Scott, Burns, Fielding, Dickens, and Charles Reade is protected against literary miasmas by the strength of its humour and the ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... snivelling poltroon and coward, though in fine clothes and with fine ways and fine manners, which only, from our point of view, make matters worse. It is, with variations I admit, much the same all through: R. L. Stevenson felt it and confessed it about the Ebb-Tide, and Huish, the cockney hero and villain; but the sense of healthy disgust, even at the vile Huish, is not emphasised in the book as it would have demanded to be for the stage—the audience would not have stood it, and the more mixed and varied, the less would it have stood it—not at all; and his relief of ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... have too long been in the habit of trying to raise a laugh about every thing, and we have too long been inundated with a species of drama in which the chief wit is anachronism and the chief wisdom a Cockney familiarity with the disreputable works of the Metropolis. We trust that the debut of the Prodigal Son at Vauxhall and the Casinos is that crisis of a disease which precedes a return to health, and that henceforth we shall hear less about ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... superior, and seem to think that no one but themselves knows how to speak or behave. Someone said to me once, 'You live in Liverpool, then why haven't you a Lancashire accent?' I was so cross. What should she have thought of me if I had said, 'You live in London, why don't you speak like a Cockney?' We are not at all ashamed, but very proud indeed, of coming ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... not accustomed to the quiet elegance of a great hotel. The men in evening dress, the gorgeously attired ladies passing to elevator or drawing-room, seemed to be listening to her. Why did the bureau keeper speak so loudly? Then the assurance of the Cockney came to her aid. ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... "cockney" improvements that had lately taken place, among which the venerable castle ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... mind Melora's locking the door between, of course. We always do. I'm such a cockney, I'm timid; and Melora's ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Bolshevik, suddenly losing her round faced calm and the shepherdess look in her eyes, burst forth in a voluble outcry in praise of the beauty of anarchy, expressing herself in broken English, spoken with a cockney accent, in broken French and liquid Russian. Enid Blunt, increasingly guttural, and mingling German words with her Bedford Park English, refuted, or strove to refute, Jennings's ecstatic praise of French verse, citing rapidly poems composed by members of the Sitwell ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... suspended operations, rose heavily to his feet, and cleared his throat. Then he turned upon the alcoholic Coaldust. I strained my ears. Surely he was not going to talk Cockney! ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... those who appreciate him never feel the need of such deviation. He has a genius for coining absurd names and words, which, even when they are suggested by the exigencies of his metre, have a ludicrous appropriateness to the matter in hand. His verse is, with the exception of a certain number of cockney rhymes, wonderfully flowing and even melodious—or, as he would say, meloobious—while to all these qualifications for his task must finally be added the happy gift of pictorial expression, enabling him to double, nay, often to quadruple, the laughable effect of his text by ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... native heath and the City clerk on the loose, however, were not prone to such vestments as young Mr. Karslake affected. It wasn't that he overdressed; even the ribald would have hesitated to libel him with the name of a "nut"—which is Cockney for what the United States knows as a "fancy (or swell) dresser"; it was simply that he was always irreproachably turned out, whatever the form of dress he thought appropriate to the time of day; and that his wardrobe was so complete and varied that he seldom appeared twice in the same suit ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... "A cockney in a rural village was stared at as much as if he had intruded into a kraal of Hottentots. On the other hand, when the lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished from the resident population as a Turk ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... at the door, with some condescension. When the last flimsy parcel had been taken within, Mrs Budd brought in Mrs Perkins and the baby to introduce them to Mavis. Mrs Perkins sat down and assumed a manner of superfine gentility, while she talked with a Cockney accent. Her mother remained standing. The dust-cloak lived in Kensington, it informed Mavis, "which was so convenient for the West End: it was only an hour's 'bus ride ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... I'm pretty, eh?" the boxer challenged him, and Max started with surprise at sound of the Cockney accent, which came with a hissing sound from the defaced mouth. Pelle was ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... printed first in Jamieson's collection—1806; again in Chambers's, p. 150. The 'waly' has been by Cockney critics called Scotch for 'wail ye.' The word may come from the same etymological source as 'wail,' but it is a Scots adverb, indicative of the ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... successfully fought poverty and ill-health; he had risen from a newspaper-boy's existence to the dizzy heights of a milkman's cart. His pale face with its prominent eyes and rich, chestnut forelock bore an expression of indomitable Cockney confidence in the ultimate decency of things. He had always been kind to his mother. "More like a girl than a boy," she said, "in the way he cared for his home and looked after me." And now Jimmy was dead: the message had come that he would not return. ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... 'There's cockney, and there's country, and there's school. Mix the three, strain and throw away the ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... we have a peasant girl who looks as if she knew L. E. L.'s poems by heart, and English rustics, whose costume seems to indicate that they are meant for ploughmen, with exotic features that remind us of a handsome primo tenore. Rather than such cockney sentimentality as this, as an education for the taste and sympathies, we prefer the most crapulous group of boors that Teniers ever painted. But even those among our painters who aim at giving the rustic type of features, who are far above the effeminate feebleness of ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... poor father and mother were better against a country background. And foreigners might attribute some quaint tricks of manner and speech to their being Americans, just as she and Peter hadn't known how awful the cockney accent was until they had ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... hard on us, Honor? Why are you so hard on me? I should say. For you are sweetness itself to that little curate of Drum, and he's about the poorest specimen of the Cockney ...
— Only an Irish Girl • Mrs. Hungerford
... score! I tell you I had to listen to some fairly obscene descriptions of myself and his feelings for me—all in the best Houndsditch. . . . Yet here again was a queer thing—again and again this gutter-flow would check itself, drop its Cockney as if down a sink, and, bubbling up again, start flowing to the language of an educated man. . . . The first time this happened it gave me a shock, less the abruptness of the break than by its sudden assault upon my memory. All insensibly, and unmarked by me, Farrell's ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to be an urbane people, a civilizing people—above such petty irritating things. I'd as soon put barbed wire along the footpath across that field where the village children go to school. Or claim that our mushrooms are cultivated. Or prosecute a Sunday-Society Cockney for picking my primroses. Custom-houses indeed! It's Chinese. There are things a Great Country mustn't do, Stephen. A country like ours ought to get along without the manners of a hard-breathing competitive cad.... If it can't I'd rather it didn't get along.... What's ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... in the same perfect, easy, colloquial style, rich in natural literary allusions and frequently rhythmic with poetic feeling, which marked his latest novel. He also had perfect command of slang and the cockney dialect of the Londoner. No greater master of dialogue or narrative ever wrote than he who pictured the gradual degradation of Becky Sharp or the many self-sacrifices of Henry Esmond for the woman ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... was Robin" is right enough; but "He was a good man, was Robin" is not so well, and we must own that it is Dickensian; but assuredly Dickens writes such phrases as it were dramatically, playing the cockney. I know of but two words that Dickens habitually misuses, and Charles Lamb misuses one of them precisely in Dickens's manner; it is not worth while to quote them. But for these his English is admirable; he chooses what is good ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... or a glimpse of the sea; they will not leave one another, and they indulge their pet dislikes: this shies at a camel, that kicks at a dog. Presently Tamaddun, as the Arabs say, "urbanity," or, more literally, being "citified," asserts itself, as in the human cockney; and at last they become cleverer and more knowing than any country-bred. They climb up the ladders of stone with marvellous caution, and slip down the slopes of sand on their haunches; they round every rat-hole which would admit a hoof; and they know better than we ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... Frenchman, and vice versa; as the German thinks of both, and all think of the Yankee. In a word, his own tribe contains everything that is excellent, with the Pawnee, the Osage and Pottawattomie, as Paris contains all that is perfect in the eyes of the bourgeois, London in those of the cockney, and this virtuous republic in those of its own enlightened citizens; while the hostile communities are remorselessly given up to the tender solicitude of those beings which lead nations, as well as ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... or fifth visit to this beautiful mountain lake of Lano-to (i.e., the Deep Lake), and the oftener I came the more its beauty grew upon me. Alas! its sweet solitude is now disturbed by the cheap Cockney and Yankee tourist globe-trotter who come there in the American excursion steamers. In the olden days only natives frequented the spot—very rarely was a white man seen. To reach it from Apia takes about five hours on foot, but there is now ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... Reeling along a merry troll of chimes, With careless truth,—a dance of fuddled Graces; Hear it—Gazette, Post, Herald, Standard, Times, I'd write an epic! Coffee for its basis; Sweet as e'er warbled forth from cockney throttles Since Bob Montgomery's ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... East in many of the non-essentials, yet, perhaps, enough of variance is observed to make it noticeable and altogether piquant to the wide-awake Yankee, who, in turn, balances the Western "reckoning" by his unique "kalkilations." But neither are as absurd as the Cockney, who gets off his ridiculous nonsense, as, for example, the following: "Ho Lord, help us to take hold of the horns ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... deplorable breaches of etiquette on the part of visitors at the Zoo. We ourselves have heard the most uncomplimentary allusions made to the appearance of the baboons and the hippopotamus, in the hearing of those unfortunate creatures, and quite regardless of their amour propre. The callous Cockney takes care to insult his helpless victims only when they are behind bars and cannot retaliate effectively. One shudders to think of the mental humiliation that is daily experienced by the warthog and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... the crew was crowded close around a little red-faced cockney. He was the modern "chanty man." With sweat pouring down his cheeks and the muscles of his neck drawn taut, he was jerking out verse after verse about women. He sang to an old "chanty" tune, one that I remembered well. But he was not singing ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... a back door, and in a little waiting-room I was introduced to some of the speakers. They were a scratch lot as seen in that dingy place. The chairman was a shop-steward in one of the Societies, a fierce little rat of a man, who spoke with a cockney accent and addressed me as 'Comrade'. But one of them roused my liveliest interest. I heard the name of Gresson, and turned to find a fellow of about thirty-five, rather sprucely dressed, with a flower in his buttonhole. 'Mr Brand,' he ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... rare; Flash'd like Aurora's glare; Quick jotted down with care; Some the reverse of fair; Some that we well could spare; Some that were made to bear Blunders unnumbered. Plunging in metaphor, Not a bit better for— Pardon the Cockney rhyme!— Similies plunder'd. Praising Tobacco smoke, Heeding not grammar's yoke, Prosody's rules they broke. Many a rhyming moke, Sense from rhyme sundered: Many wrote well, but not— Not the Six Hundred. Honour Tobacco! roll'd, Cut, press'd, however sold. Alpha and Beta, bold, Ye shall ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... The moon shone too, with bull's-eye sweeps, on his companions; on the stalwart frame of the American who called himself Brown, and was known to be a master-mariner in some disgrace; and on the dwarfish person, the pale eyes and toothless smile of a vulgar and bad-hearted cockney clerk. Here was society for Robert Herrick! The Yankee skipper was a man at least: he had sterling qualities of tenderness and resolution: he was one whose hand you could take without a blush. But there was no redeeming ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... owner of the Cockney voice, rising to his feet and revealing himself a small man with large head and thin wizened features, "Mr. Chairman, I rise to protest right 'ere an' naow against the presence of (h)any representative of the ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... know how catchin' an idea like that is. Up to then we hadn't taken much notice of the crew, no more'n you do of the help anywhere. Oh, we'd got so we could tell the deck stewards apart. One was a squint-eyed little Cockney that misplaced his aitches, but was always on hand when you wanted anything. Another was a tall, lanky Swede who was always "Yust coomin', sir." Then there was the bristly-haired Hungarian we called Goulash. They'd all seemed harmless enough before; but now we took to sizin' 'em ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... to the Cockney rhyming slang it has been compared to in the past, because Cockney substitutions are opaque whereas hacker punning jargon ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... matter of the quaint features of the speech of the English countryside, or the wonders of the Cockney dialect, the unlearned foreigner hardly dare venture. It is sufficient for us to wonder why a railroad should be a railway. When it becomes a "rilewie" we are inclined, in our speculation, "to pass," as we say over ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... from thousands of throats. As the General drove to Government House, he was greeted by cries of "Avenge Majuba!" and "Bravo, General!" and by the amount of emotion expended and the universal expression of relief evidenced, it was plain that the Cape colonists, like the cockney Londoner, were prepared "to bet their bottom dollar" on the combination of Sir Redvers Buller and Mr. ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... Hampstead Road, the house which Kit enveloped in an inimitable air of domesticity. Her past had not been unconnected with the minor stage. She could play on the piano from ear, and sing the songs of the street with a charming cockney twang. But there was nothing of the stage about her now. She was born for domesticity and, as the wife of Malim, she wished to forget all that had gone before. She even hesitated to give us her wonderful imitations of the customers at the fried fish shop, because ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... return at once to the scenes about Quade's place, but went to the station, three quarters of a mile farther up the track. Here, in a casual way, he learned from the little pink-faced Cockney Englishman who watched the office at night that Stevens had been correct in his information. Quade had gone to Tete Jaune. Although it was eleven o'clock, Aldous proceeded in the direction of the engineers' camp, still another quarter of a mile deeper in the bush. He was restless. He did ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... cockney and an old soldier, and stood so bolt upright that it seemed quite a marvel how the words ever managed to climb up the steep ascent of his throat, and turn the corner so as to get out at his mouth. Perhaps this was the cause of his speaking ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... pair looked the most ridiculous it would be hard to say: a great-grandson of George the Second in the Highland garb of "Bonnie Prince Charlie," was perhaps as absurd an anachronism as a fat cockney alderman in the same fancy costume. Our friends the caricaturists were fully alive to these puerilities. An anonymous caricature of the day celebrates the ludicrous event in a satire entitled, Equipt ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... tempting supper for him that I am sure he was glad of the chance to stay. He was very decidedly English, and powerfully proud of it. He asked Mrs. O'Shaughnessy if she was Irish and she said, "No, ye haythen, it's Chinese Oi am. Can't yez tell it be me Cockney accint?" Mr. Boutwell looked very much surprised. I don't know which was the funnier, the way he looked or what ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... participating in the advantages of a residence in London—for frequenting gin-palaces and music-halls, for observing the beauties of the West End and cultivating the society of appreciative housemaids. To a ragged and simple-minded rustic or to a young Cockney of vague resources all this ought to be a brilliant picture. That the picture should seem to contain any shadows is a proof of the deep-seated relish in the human mind for our personal independence. The fear of "too ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... villages, picturesque parks, and elegant casinos. With the exception of Constantinople, there is no city in the world that can for a moment enter into competition with it. For himself, though in his time something of a rambler, he is not ashamed in this respect to confess to a legitimate Cockney taste; and for his part he does not know where life can flow on more pleasantly than in sight of Kensington Gardens, viewing the silver Thames winding by the bowers of Rosebank, or inhaling from its terraces the refined ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... whit more conceited than Mr. Herbert Spencer, or Mr. Goldwin Smith, or Professor Tyndall,—or any lively London apprentice out on a Sunday; but this general superciliousness with respect to Solomon, his Proverbs, and his politics, characteristic of the modern Cockney, Yankee, and Anglicised Scot, is a difficult thing to deal with for us of the old school, who were well whipped when we were young; and have been in the habit of occasionally ascertaining our own levels as ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... noise-ridden streets, can call us rustics if they choose, but for all that Fairfield is a better place to live in than London. Doctor says that when he goes to London his mind is bruised with the weight of the houses, and he was a Cockney born. He had to live there himself when he was a little chap, but he knows better now. You gentlemen may laugh—perhaps some of you come from London way—but it seems to me that a witness like that is ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... huge man, bronzed and moustached, with a deep bass voice and an almost guttural speech, and the other, Raff, was slight and effeminate, with nervous hands and watery, washed-out gray eyes, who spoke with a faint indefinable accent that was hauntingly reminiscent of the Cockney, and that was yet not Cockney of any brand she had ever encountered. Whatever they were, they were self-made men, she concluded; and she felt the impulse to shudder at thought of falling into their hands in a business way. There, they would ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... had by that time received for wear from the city: and again, while Mr. Wordsworth, in irrepressible religious rapture, calls God to witness that the houses seem asleep, Byron, lame demon as he was, flying smoke-drifted, unroofs the houses at a glance, and sees what the mighty cockney heart of them contains in the still lying of it, and will stir up to purpose in ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... as Yonson, a man of the heavy Scandinavian type, ceased chafing me, and arose awkwardly to his feet. The man who had spoken to him was clearly a Cockney, with the clean lines and weakly pretty, almost effeminate, face of the man who has absorbed the sound of Bow Bells with his mother's milk. A draggled muslin cap on his head and a dirty gunny-sack about his slim hips proclaimed him cook of the decidedly dirty ship's ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... the roadway, and took their place among the slowly moving people there, the Inspector make a way for himself and his companion through the excited, talkative, good-humored Cockney crowd. "There it is! Can't you see it? Up there just like a little yellow worm." "There's naught at all! You've got the cobble-wobbles!" and then ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... Mrs. Samuel Untermyer, of New York. On the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, in 1877, Ruskin wrote in Fors Clavigera: "The ill-educated conceit of the artist nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen and heard much of cockney impudence before now, but never expected to have a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz
... about it! You listen to these Cockney fellows talking, and then you'll understand me. It's worse nor the Dublin adenoids voice. There's no people in the earthly world talks as fine as the Ulster people. Here's the man with your luggage!" The porter wheeled a truck, bearing John's trunk and bag, up ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... would never have made itself editorially responsible for such trash. As to him of the "Quarterly," a thimble would have been "a mansion, a court," for his whole soul. The style of the articles directed against the Radical writers, and those especially whom the party had nicknamed the "Cockney school" of poetry, may be conceived by its provoking the following observation from Hazlitt to me:—"To pay those fellows, Sir, in their own coin, the way would be, to begin with Walter Scott, and have at ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... there not be parts of the world in which races of inferior intelligence or energy should hold their own? I am not so anxious to see the whole earth covered by an indefinite multiplication of the cockney type. But I only quote the suggestion for another reason. Till recent years the struggle for existence was carried on as between Europeans and negroes by simple violence and brutality. The slave trade and its consequences have condemned the whole continent ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... thin, tall, hawknosed individual who could have played Sherlock Holmes on TV. Once he got into character for a part, he never got out of it unless absolutely necessary. Right now, he was a Cockney cab-driver, and he would play the ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... very Arcadian and un-Cockney-like in the idea of linnet-singing in Lock's Fields. Imagination pictures so readily the green pastures and the wild bird's song, and Corydon with his pipe and his Phyllis, that it seems a pity to disabuse that exquisite faculty of our nature so far as to suggest that the linnets of which ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... off her masthead, steering and cabin electrics, and turned into a dingy white ferryboat, full of cold passengers. I spoke to a Canadian about her. 'Why, she's the old So-and-So, to Port Levis,' he answered, wondering as the Cockney wonders when a stranger stares at an Inner Circle train. This was his Inner Circle—the Zion where he was all at ease. He drew my attention to stately city and stately river with the same tranquil pride that we each feel when ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... has altered; the language has developed; the plain, ordinary talk of Shakespeare's time now seems to us quaint and odd; every-day allusions have become cryptic. It all "ain't up to date," to quote the Cockney's complaint about it. Probably no one to-day can under any circumstances get the same reaction to a play of Shakespeare as that of his original audience, and probably no ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... hospitality and the pleasures of his society? The matter was simply this: His Serene Highness was venturing a small fish to catch a large one. As a good and provident ruler, anxious for the prosperity and well-being of his subjects, he was making a bid for the valuable patronage of the British Cockney. He was acting the part of land-lord of a gratuitous "free-and-easy," in the hope of making Florence an attractive place of residence to that large class of nomad English to whom gratuitous court-balls once a week appeared to be a near approach to those "Saturnia regna" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... "could make this possible," when, looking up, he caught the face of a young man at a further table, full of enjoyment, ordering "spargetty" and half a bottle of "grayves," with a cockney twang, and an ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... writes Mr. Maurice Kingsley, "Uncle Henry's settling in Eversley was a great event.... At times he fairly bubbled over with humour; while his knowledge of slang—Burschen, Bargee, Parisian, Irish, Cockney, and English provincialisms—was awful and wonderful. Nothing was better than to get our uncle on his 'genteel behaviour,' which, of course, meant exactly the opposite, and brought forth inimitable stories, scraps of old songs and impromptu conversations, the choicest of ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... this day that Lord Albemarle got off his famous pun. On the Queen saying to him, "I wonder if my good people of London are as glad to see me as I am to see them?" he replied by pointing to the letters "V. R." "Your Majesty can see their loyal cockney answer-'Ve are.'" ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... for a trip in their pleasure boats, setting forth all the tempting delights of a fine breeze—and woe-betide the unfortunate cockney who gets in the clutches of a pair of plyers of this sort, for he becomes as fixed as if he were actually in a vice, frequently making a virtue of necessity, and stepping on board, when he had much ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... houses, we frequently found some which were low-rented, that is from $200 $250 per annum; but either they were much smaller than we required, or dreadfully out of repair, or else they were built "Cockney fashion," semi-detached, or, as was frequently the case, situated in a locality which for some reason or other was highly objectionable. We always found rents lower in proportion to ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... gone in a moment, kicked off with the second boot, and the child goes shouting to complete the landscape with the lacking colour of life. You are inclined to wonder that, even undressed, he still shouts with a Cockney accent. You half expect pure vowels and elastic syllables from his restoration, his spring, his slenderness, his brightness, and his glow. Old ivory and wild rose in the deepening midsummer sun, he gives his colours ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... fustian frock coat. He had a long face, long nose, and wide mouth, with large restless eyes. There was a grin on his countenance which seemed permanent, and had it not been for his bronzed complexion, I should have declared him to be a cockney, and nothing else. He was, however, no such thing, but what is called a rock lizard, that is, a person born at Gibraltar of English parents. Upon hearing my question, which was in Spanish, he grinned more than ever, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... sunshine!" The old woman, who had spoken tearlessly, as from a dead, tearless heart, of the worst essentials of her tragedy, was caught by a sob at something in this memory of the ship at the Nore—why, Heaven knows!—and her voice broke over it. To Aunt M'riar, cockney to the core, a ship was only a convention, necessary for character, in an offing with an orange-chrome sunset claiming your attention rather noisily in the background. There were pavement-artists in those days as now. This ship the old lady told of was ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... though, is simpler of Roc's egg or Sangreal, Easier to fashion a flying machine, Than for my Muse to fake up (forgive Cockney slang) real Readable ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, May 6, 1893 • Various
... 'Twas lighter work then than now. 'The old saying at London, among servants,' writes that good-natured theatrical wag, Tate Wilkinson, 'was, "I wish you were at York!" which the wronged cook has now changed for, "I wish you were at Jamaica." Scotland was then imagined by the cockney as a dreary place, distant almost as the West Indies; now'(reader, pray note the marvel) 'an agreeable party may, with the utmost ease, dine early in the week in Grosvenor Square, and without discomposure set down ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... interrupted a voice in vigorous cockney, "this 'ere tide ain't in the 'abit o' waitin'. If we go to-night, we go this minute, sir!" It was the skipper, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... tops of a chalky white. Yet, withal, not the air and walk of a genuine born and bred sporting man, even of the vulgar order. Something about him which reveals the pretender. A would-be hawk with a pigeon's liver,—a would-be sportsman with a Cockney's nurture. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the pert assurance of the born Cockney, "but we aren't allowed to give information ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... and sole reason that almost any English circulating library stuff will at any time meet with better patronage than a home work. When our public becomes as much interested in itself as it is in the very common-place life of Cockney clergymen and clerks, we shall perhaps witness a truly generous encouragement of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... coniferous tribe had arisen at every available point of the landscape, wherever there had been barrenness before. Here and there the old timber had been thinned a little, always judiciously. No cockney freaks of fancy disfigured the scene. There were no sham ruins, no artificial waterfalls poorly supplied with water, no Chinese pagodas, or Swiss cottages, or gothic hermitages. At one point of the shrubbery where the gloom of cypress and fir was deepest, they came suddenly on a Grecian ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... at it again!" cried Rowles; "these cockney boatmen, how they do try to drown themselves! Hold hard!" he shouted to the engineer ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... and a various mixture of liberal and enlightened men with most of the evil-doers and unprincipled adventurers in the country. A vivid and rather a pleasant idea of New England manners, when this change had become decided, is given in the journal of John Dunton, a cockney bookseller, who visited Boston and other towns of Massachusetts with a cargo of pious publications, suited to the Puritan market. Making due allowance for the flippancy of the writer, which may have given a livelier tone to his descriptions than truth precisely warrants, and also for his character, ...
— Dr. Bullivant - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is a square old building of wood without paint or decoration, and of that genuine Puritanic stamp which is now fast giving way to Greek porticos and to cockney towers. It stands upon a hill, with a little churchyard in its rear, where one or two sickly-looking trees keep watch and ward over the vagrant sheep that graze among the graves. Bramble-bushes seem to thrive on the bodies below, and there is no flower in the little ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell |
