"Cockney" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sport, they both deemed the most exciting, caused them to upbraid me, till half-past two, with such epithets as, "an old woman," "a shocking cockney," "a fellow only fit to wear white kid gloves," "a Regent Street swell," "a land lubber," "a milk sop," and a multitude of other curious idioms, that rather made me merry than clashed ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... it great facility of approach; take care that the performances never exceed three hours; let lions and dwarfs pass by without any endeavour to get them within the walls; lay aside all ambition of making stage waves which may almost equal real Ramsgate waves to our cockney apprehensions. Of course there must be good ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... horse of the Rajah of Rumtool," he said, "I should have been brave indeed only by this time there would have been nothing left of me to thank. A man would have needed courage to take him by the head! But a quiet good-tempered carriage-horse—none but a cockney would ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... 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, and ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... junction where an English railway company begins to get in its work and to animate the Spanish environment to unwonted enterprise, there was a varied luncheon far past our capacity. But when a Cockney voice asked over my shoulder, "Tea, sir?" I gladly closed with the proposition. "But you've put hot milk into it!" I protested. "I know it, sir. We 'ave no cold milk at Bobadilla," and instantly a baleful suspicion implanted itself ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... the Quarterly upon Keats. Endymion, in spite of the noble self-criticism of its preface, is denounced as "Cockney poetry" [Footnote: The phrase was also employed by Blackwood, vol. iii. 519-524.]—a stupid and pointless vulgarism—and is branded as clothing "the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language". The author is dismissed with the following amenities: "Being bitten by Leigh Hunt's insane ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... in habits of contempt and exultant gibing, and yet are confident that—as Clarissa one day said to me—"We can always teach them to be reverent in the right place, you know." And doubtless if she were to take her boys to see a burlesque Socrates, with swollen legs, dying in the utterance of cockney puns, and were to hang up a sketch of this comic scene among their bedroom prints, she would think this preparation not at all to the prejudice of their emotions on hearing their tutor read that narrative of the Apology which has been consecrated by ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... 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 at table on Saturday ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... political independence only. It secured nothing beyond that. Morally we were not independent. Socially, we were not independent. There was a time, we can all remember it, when we literally trembled before every cockney that strangled innocent aspirates at their birth. We had not secured our moral independence of Europe, and particularly not of our own kindred and people. We literally crouched at the feet of England, and begged for recognition like a poor, disowned relation. We scarcely knew ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... ascends, Rogers and Manson are discovered laying the table for breakfast, the lad being at the upper end of the table, facing the audience, Manson, with his back to the audience, being at the lower end. Rogers is an ordinary little cockney boy in buttons; Manson is dressed in his native Eastern costume. His face is not seen until the ...
— The Servant in the House • Charles Rann Kennedy
... one of the most universally played chain games in the British Isles. It belongs as much to the child with a rich Dublin brogue as to the Cockney boy, one thing being altered in the verse—the place, "How many miles to Wexford or Dublin" being substituted for Wimbledon. Coventry and Burslem take the child fancy in ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... trees, in the soft summer twilight, smoking their pipes and drinking in the melodious utterances. An indistinct idea that this was pastoral happiness pervaded the camp. "This 'ere kind o' think," said the Cockney Simmons, meditatively reclining on his elbow, "is 'evingly." ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... Parisian cockney, pecking among the brood most plethoric with conceit, of all the coop-fed citizens who tread the pavements of earth's many-chimneyed towns! America has made implements of husbandry which out-mow and out-reap the world. She has contrived man-slaying engines ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... minds this popular Cockney watering-place has great attractions; its broad sands, its beautiful air, and its boisterous amusements, negro-melodies, merry-go-rounds, and the like; but it was a place seldom visited by Dickens, although he was so often near it. ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... dear!" This is Oliver a little sternly from the upper berth. "That was your bath that came in a minute ago and said something in Cockney. At least I think it was—mine's voice is a good deal more like one of Peter's butlers—" "But, Ollie, I'm ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... the Play-writer. A little too much always about Miss Austen, whom yet I think quite capital in a Circle I have found quite unendurable to walk in. Thackeray's first Number was famous, I thought: his own little Roundabout Paper so pleasant: but the Second Number, I say, lets the Cockney in already: about Hogarth: Lewes is vulgar: and I don't think one can care much for Thackeray's Novel. He is always talking so of himself, too. I have been very glad to find I could take to a Novel again, in Trollope's Barchester Towers, etc.: not perfect, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... want to know it; another wasn't certain whether he was a tallow-chandler or a button-maker; a third, who had met with him somewhere, described him as a damned ass; a fourth said, 'Oh, don't be hard on him; he's only a vulgar old Cockney, without an h in his whole composition.' A chorus of general agreement followed, as the dinner-hour approached: 'What a bore!' I whispered to my friend, 'Why do they go?' He answered, 'You see, one must do this sort of thing.' And when we got to the Mansion ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... peculiar to themselves, than the disciples of 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 the whole ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... that we, Americans, descended mostly from them. When a man is ill used, it invites others to insult him. One of our prisoners, who had been treated with a drink of grog, took out his knife, and, as the cockney's face was turned the other way, cut off one skirt of his long coat. This excited peals of laughter. When the poor Londoner saw that this was done by a roguish American, at the instigation of his own countrymen, the tear stood in his eye. Even our jolly, big bellied ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... visited by a Mr. Lewis, a smart Cockney, whose object is to amend the handwriting. He uses as a mechanical aid a sort of puzzle of wire and ivory, which is put upon the fingers to keep them in the desired position, like the muzzle on a dog's nose to make him bear himself right in the field. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... above I encountered my tutor, half-dressed, a candle in hand. 'Twas a queer figure he cut, thinks I—an odd, inconsequent figure in a mysterious broil of the men of our kind. What was this cockney—this wretched alien—when the passions of our coast were stirring? He would be better in bed. An eye he had—age-wise ways and a glance to overawe my youth—but what was he, after all, in such a case as this? I was his master, however unlearned I ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... she did not say audibly. The cockney rubber was fondling the mare's muzzle and he did not hear Betty's comment. The discovery of this second ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson
... given by a sergeant of the Coldstream Guards as he watched a dense mass of Germans emerging to the attack from a wood, and prepared to meet them with the bayonet. When first the fierce German searchlights were turned on the British lines a little cockney in the Middlesex Regiment exclaimed to his comrade: "Lord, Bill, it's just like a play, an' us in the limelight"; and as the artillery fusillade passed over their heads, and a great ironical cheer rose from the British trenches, he added: ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... of 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 in ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz
... my folly! He has heard that word of some great man, and now applies it to a fool. Vent my folly! I am afraid this great lubber, the world, will prove a cockney. I prithee now, ungird thy strangeness, and tell me what I shall vent to my lady; shall I vent to her ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... intimately associated. It seemed more politic to obey his instincts and remain unobtrusive in company and drift away inoffensively when the chance occurred. One of the men with whom he talked occasionally was a red-headed little cockney by the name of Shendish. For some reason or the other—perhaps because his name conveyed a perfectly wrong suggestion of the Hebraic—he was always called ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... the demand. From the agricultural labourers you cannot receive any material number of recruits. The land, above all things, must be tilled; and—notwithstanding the trashy assertions of popular slip-slop authors and Cockney sentimentalists, who have favored us with pictures of the Will Ferns of the kingdom, as unlike the reality as may be—the condition of those who cultivate the soil of Britain is superior to that of the peasantry in every other ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... chastened English prose, we have men of genius who have fallen into evil habits. Bulwer, who knew better, would quite revel in a stagey bombast; Dickens, with his pathos and his humour, was capable of sinking into a theatrical mannerism and cockney vulgarities of wretched taste; Disraeli, with all his wit and savoir faire, has printed some rank fustian, and much slip-slop gossip; and George Meredith at times can be as jerky and mysterious as ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... had then recently combined tea-dealing with literature. It is described as "translated from the original by several hands," but if so all Spanish flavour has entirely evaporated under the manipulation of the several hands. The flavour that it has, on the other hand, is distinctly Franco-cockney. Anyone who compares it carefully with the original will have little doubt that it is a concoction from Shelton and the French of Filleau de Saint Martin, eked out by borrowings from Phillips, whose ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... responded Charles, but no one save the traveller at the small table caught the play on words, the Cockney cant term for money being unfamiliar to American ears. He smiled, and then studied the bond-servant with more interest than ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... fourth 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 ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... of a large stock of clothes, which he was evidently glad to have an opportunity of exhibiting. He first came up with a souwester on his head, the wrong end foremost, and a pair of canvas shoes on his feet,—a sort of miniature Micawber, or first-class cockney "salt," about to breast the briny. This small person's long nose, large ears, and open mouth added to the ludicrousness of his appearance. As the decks were wet and the morning cold, he found the garb somewhat unsuitable, ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... 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 ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... think after this series of inexplicable events? Carefinotu speaking English like a cockney, calling him by his name, announcing the early arrival of Uncle Will, and then the ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... was one of those who, on all such occasions, "died hard." He was the last man in the ship who ever gave up a prejudice; and this for three several reasons: he was a cockney, and believed himself born in the centre of human knowledge; he was a seaman, and understood the world; he was a boatswain, and stood upon ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... lined on either side by members of our company, specklessly turned out and standing to attention. At the foot of the slope a gun-carriage is waiting, drawn by two great dray horses and controlled by a private of the Royal Artillery, who looks incongruously perky and cockney amid that silent, kilted assemblage. The firing party form a short lane from the gun-carriage to the door of the mortuary. In response to the sergeant's command, each man turns over his rifle, and setting the muzzle carefully upon his right boot—after all, ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... mental gipsy, to whom books were roads open to adventures; he saw skies in books, and books in skies, and in every orderly section of social life magic possibilities of vagrancy. But he was also a Cockney, a lover of limit, civic tradition, the uniform of all ritual. He liked exceptions, because, in every other instance, he would approve of the rule. He broke bounds with exquisite decorum. There was in all his excesses something of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the practices above inculcated as subserving that need, we are prepared to defend them even on the score of the knowledge gained. If men are to be mere cits, mere porers over ledgers, with no ideas beyond their trades—if it is well that they should be as the cockney whose conception of rural pleasures extends no further than sitting in a tea-garden smoking pipes and drinking porter; or as the squire who thinks of woods as places for shooting in, of uncultivated plants as nothing but weeds, and ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... I realized in the cockney waiter a man who might be useful, hence I gave him a substantial tip when I signed ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... who join the army because they can do nothing else. There were, in fact, a good many of these. I soon learned, however, that the general out-at-elbows appearance was due to another cause. A genial Cockney gave me the hint. ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... Bass, gov'nor," responded Millwaters promptly, dropping into colloquial Cockney speech. He turned to Perkwite and winked. "Well, an' wot abaht this 'ere bit o' business as I've come rahnd abaht, Mister?" he went on, nudging his companion, ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... also came shrill laughter. Snatches of song arose, altercations that suddenly began and as suddenly ceased, a babel of voices in many fashions of speech. Broad Yorkshire contended with the thin nasal tones of the cockney; the man from the banks of the Tweed thrust cautious sarcasms at the man from Galway. A mulatto, the color of pale amber, spoke sonorous Spanish to an olive-hued piece of drift-wood from Florida. An Indian indulged ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... are written 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 ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... These cockney birds sure chirp some language. Believe you me, a guy had orto carry an interpreter around with him. Me and Skinny went out to a swell English camp today to take a peep at English trainin methods; outside we sees a tipical Tommy ...
— Love Letters of a Rookie to Julie • Barney Stone
... 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, and ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... the third day after I had taken up my quarters in the ship, another person was received on board in accordance with a mandate from the supercargo. His name was Frederick Strictland. He was an Englishman, a veritable cockney, about nineteen or twenty years of age, a strong-built and rather good-looking young man. His countenance, although intelligent, was not prepossessing; there was a sort of nameless expression about the eye which repelled confidence ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... would cock a nose At "Cockney JOHN," as certain foes Called JOSEPH's rival. Words like those Part Shepherd swains. Sad when crook-wielders meet ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 20, 1892 • Various
... log, laughs heartily. He produces another cigarette, and tries in vain to light it. Then, as an atrocious little cockney enters whistling gaily, he addresses him ...
— The Noble Lord - A Comedy in One Act • Percival Wilde
... for passengers 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 better stroll ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... of the town, crowning the gentle hills that lie to the north and west, villas in acre plots, belonging to business men in the county town some ten miles distant, "prick their Cockney ears" and are strangely at variance with the sober gravity of the indigenous houses. So, too, are the manners and customs of their owners, who go to Stoneborough every morning to their work, and return by the train that brings ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... is commonly supposed, and is intelligible after some practice; but the choice of stanza is unfortunate, though in spite of it, Spenser's verse is more melodious than any other English poet's except Mr. Waller's.[19] Ambrose Philips—Namby Pamby Philips—whom Thackeray calls "a dreary idyllic cockney," appealed to "The Shepherd's Calendar" as his model, in the introduction to his insipid "Pastorals," 1709. Steele, in No. 540 of the Spectator (November 19, 1712), printed some mildly commendatory remarks ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 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 on a stick. ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... threw one every day. It was for that reason that we kept him on the ground floor farther down in the row of cells in which we lodged. After he had had a few fits in the prison-yard, the guards refused to be bothered with him any more, and so he remained locked up in his cell all day with a Cockney cell-mate, to keep him company. Not that the Cockney was of any use. Whenever the Dutch boy had a fit, the Cockney ...
— The Road • Jack London
... that Pyramus slipped "Lines on Thisbe's Cat" through the celebrated hole-in-the-wall? No such thing. If he had, there would have been as little poetry in his love as in his verses. No man could have had the insolence, not even a Cockney poetaster, to kill himself for love, after having scribbled namby-pambys in a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... Dick, shaking his head and laughing. "Come, I'm not such a Cockney as not to know what a b-u-o-y is. But, I say, ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... their wants, and minister to their convenience, an army of servants, of one description or other, was kept; waiters, chambermaids, grooms, postillions, shoe-blacks, cooks, scullions, and what not, for there was a barber and hair-dresser, who had been at Paris, and talked French with a cockney accent; the French sounding all the better, as no accent is so melodious as the cockney. Jacks creaked in the kitchens turning round spits, on which large joints of meat piped and smoked before great big fires. There was running up and down stairs, and along galleries, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... Muse in Livery: or the Footman's Miscellany. 1732. A rhyme in the motto on the title-page shows what a Cockney muse ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... 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 the mandrill. And even the nobler animals—the lions ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... out into 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
... will tend to act as modulator of his bearing, his speech, his choice of subjects, his preferences. Much of the comedy of life lies here, in the way people imagine their characters for situations that are strange to them: the professor among promoters, the deacon at a poker game, the cockney in the country, the paste diamond ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... don't think 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 ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... proceeds the cockney historian, "that the conversion of Clovis was as much a matter of policy as of faith." But the cockney historian had better limit his remarks on the characters and faiths of men to those of the curates who have recently taken orders in his fashionable neighbourhood, ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... it chanced That from his room a cockney glanced At the fierce tempest as it broke, While to his neighbour thus he spoke: "The thunder has our awe inspired, Our barns by lightning have been fired,— Our sins to punish, I suppose; But in return, to soothe our woes, See how the rain in torrents fell, Making the harvest promise well! ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... no difference to him, he could not in fact overcome his lifelong prejudices, and Mildred's surroundings were not at all to his taste. Luxury and the absence of all that was rude and coarse had become essential to him, and Mrs. Wheaton's cockney English and homely life often gave him ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... colonel, a southern gentleman of the old school. In the course of his interrogation by the southern officer, he was asked where he hailed from. He replied, "London, England." "Then," said the colonel, "how is it you find yourself fighting for these accursed Yankees?" The cockney faltered out some feeble excuse or another, which his captor cut short by saying, "I've a great respect for the English, and consequently I'll let you go this time. But if ever I catch you again, you're gone up. As for those d——-d Dutchmen, they'll be strung ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... for Canobie, I was completely prostrated, and had no medicine on hand except Epsom salts. During the night we (the cook, a new-chum Cockney, and myself) heard voices down at the water-hole, which we took as from a party of travelling Chinamen. In the morning we found that, some of the blacks who were implicated in the murder had doubled ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... suffice to keep life throbbing in his bosom much longer, even in his present level, preparations were made for his ascent. A bell was rung; hoarse voices were again heard speaking and answering in sounds quite unintelligible to a Cockney's ears; chains rattled, the windlass whirled, and the huge bucket came tumbling down, nearly on their heads. Poor Neverbend was all but lifted into it. Where now was all the pride of the morn that had seen him go forth the great ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... business, was shaped by his subordinates. The smaller faults and the mannerisms of the actor did not trouble him, provided the main thought and feeling were there. He would merely laugh at a suggestion to straighten out the legs and walk, to lengthen the drawl, or to heighten the cockney accent of a prominent ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... 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 ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... volumes of 1842, which he did gladly. Lockhart hated all affectation and "preciosity," of which the new book was not destitute. He had been among Wordsworth's most ardent admirers when Wordsworth had few, but the memories of the war with the "Cockney School" clung to him, the war with Leigh Hunt, and now he gave himself up to satire. Probably he thought that the poet was a member of a London clique. There is really no excuse for Lockhart, except ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... to Edinburgh: which I have intended these thirty years, only for the purpose of seeing my dear Sir Walter's House and Home: and which I am glad to have seen, as that of Shakespeare. I had expected to find a rather Cockney Castle: but no such thing: all substantially and proportionably built, according to the Style of the Country: the Grounds well and simply laid out: the woods he planted well-grown, and that dear Tweed ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... and mobile from his somewhat scornful mouth to his deep-set, observant eyes, and clearly denoted the absence of the stolid Saxon strain in his blood. His accent too, though not that of an educated man, was quite free from the hateful Cockney twang. His dress was spare as his figure, but though well worn there was something spruce and trim about his whole demeanour which indicated that he was not totally indifferent to the impression he created on others. He looked round the "office," ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... case of all men in the trenches, I heard things and stories that especially impressed me, so I have written them as hearsay, not taking to myself credit as their originator. I trust that the reader will find as much joy in the cockney character as I did and which I have tried to show the public; let me say now that no finer body of men than those Bermondsey boys of my ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... here. The abstract barbarian would copy. The cockney and incomplete civilisation always sets itself up to be copied. And in the case here considered, the German thinks that it is not only his business to spread education, but to spread compulsory education. "Science combined with organisation," ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... 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, is—What ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... were allowed to do so: for the Earl was much disgusted with the raw material out of which he was expected to manufacture serviceable troops. Swaggering ruffians from the disreputable haunts of London, cockney apprentices, brokendown tapsters, discarded serving men; the Bardolphs and Pistols, Mouldys, Warts, and the like—more at home in tavern-brawls or in dark lanes than on the battle-field—were not ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 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
... truth, my dear Mrs. M—-, my art (she was English, and cockney, and dreadfully mangled the letter h whenever it stumbled into a ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... character of his countenance, and, without any resort to paints or cosmetics, had somehow or other given to the expression of his face an impudent, low-bred expression, with a glass screwed on to his right eye,—such a look as a cockney journeyman, wishing to pass for a "swell" about town, may cast on a servant-maid in the pit of a ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... between town and country. Few esquires came to the capital thrice in their lives. Nor was it yet the practice of all citizens in easy circumstances to breathe the fresh air of the fields and woods during some weeks of every summer. 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 or ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... turn the laugh against his chief adversary and rival, George Bates of the Eagle, who proposed seeking for the lapwing's nest in hopes of a dainty dish of plovers' eggs; being too great a cockney to remember that in September the contents of the eggs were probably flying over the heather, as well able to shift for themselves ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... something 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 ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... person I addressed was a tall young man, with a 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, and inquired, in a ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... Mr. Thackeray—a scholar too conscientious to 'decorate ' an ancient text. Bishop Percy did such things, and Scott is not beyond suspicion; but Mr. Thackeray, like Joseph Ritson, preferred the authentic voice of tradition. Thus, in the text of the Biographical Edition, he does not imitate the Cockney twang, phonetically rendered in the version of Cruikshank. The second verse, for example, ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... Mediterranean), and the whole army discharged their arms, upon the same principle that savages beat drums, or howl, during an eclipse of the moon:—it was a rare scene altogether—if you had but seen the English Johnnies, who had never been out of a cockney workshop before!—or will again, if they can help it—and on Sunday, we heard that the Vizier is come down to Larissa, with one hundred ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... was coming out of the chancery of the British Legation, a little cockney messenger in uniform came snorting into the court on a motor-cycle. As he got off he began describing his experiences, and wound up his story of triumphant progress—"And when I got to the Boulevards I ran down a blighter on a bicycle and the crowd ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... memory of those days is filled with weary hours on station platforms). It was the first time I was able to talk to British Tommies in France, and to shake their hands, and to shout out "Good luck!" to them. It was curious how strong my emotion was at seeing those laughing fellows and hearing the cockney accent of their tongues. They looked so fine and clean. Some of them were making their toilet in the cattle trucks brushing their hair as though for, a picnic party, shaving before little mirrors tacked up on ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... He is an English horse trainer, a wide-awake, stocky, well-groomed little cockney. He knows his own mind and sees life altogether through a stable door. Well-dressed for his station, and not ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... photographed, simply to amuse us. There are certainly some people who have more of the wine of life than others, and who are a wonderful refreshment to their friends. It was during this year, 1858, that we built our seaside cottage at Santubong—Sandrock Cottage, as we called it, which sounds rather cockney; but as it stood on the sand, with great boulders of granite rock scattered about, it seemed the most appropriate name. Santubong is the most beautiful of the two mouths of the Sarawak River, but not as safe as the Morotabas for ships to enter. The Bishop had a mission ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... morass, overspread with Englishmen— professional-looking men with months-old beards, pink-cheeked young fellows as fresh as if they had just stepped off Piccadilly, men in faded knicker-bockers and puttees, men in sailor blue and brass buttons, men with flat caps and cockney accent, one with a Thermos bottle, and crisp "Right you are!"—a good-natured, half-humorous, half-tragic cross-section of the London streets, drifting about here in ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... around, stepped the little drill sergeant, a finished example of precise, graceful movement. He was explaining in clean cut, and evidently memorised speech the details of the movements he wished executed, but through his more formal and memorised vocabulary his native cockney would occasionally erupt, adding vastly to the pungency and picturesqueness ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... flushed crimson. ''Ow dare you talk similar to that, Sarah?' Only she pronounced it fairly with a true cockney accent, and left out all her h's. 'I don't know w'at women are comin' to nowadays, w'at wi' one thing an' another, w'en it comes to a chit o' sixteen talkin' like that about 'er mother bein' an 'umbug, let alone sayin' she doesn't respect 'er father; an' w'at 'e'd say if 'e 'eard 'er ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... fast? Why, I have not reached three-score, and did not I "whip my gig" when I was an "infant"?—not an infant born in a remote province, sucking in archaism with my mother's milk, playing with heirloom toys, and calling them by obsolete names, but a smart little cockney, born and bred in the parish of St. Andrew, Holborn, where, no doubt, there were gig-whipping brats plenty. In the crowded state of your columns, you would not thank me for enlarging on the top-hic, or I should really feel disposed ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various
... the language," he explained. "I have no tongue but my own, you see, but I try to make up for it by cultivating every shade of that. Some of them have come in useful even to your knowledge, Bunny: what price my Cockney that night in St. John's Wood? I can keep up my end in stage Irish, real Devonshire, very fair Norfolk, and three distinct Yorkshire dialects. But my good Galloway Scots might be better, and I ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... summer carriages, and in some decree to the rudeness of the soil, in the Upper Province especially, boats are in much more general use; and excursions on the water, are as common to that class "whose only toil is pleasure." as cockney trips to Richmond, or to any other of the thousand and one places of resort, which have sprung into existence, within twenty miles of the Metropolis of England. Not confined, however, to picking daisies for their doxies, as these said cockneys do, or carving their vulgar ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... said he, as he was preparing to go out, soon after breakfast, on the morning after his arrival, "are scarcely the thing; and as I, like you, am a stranger in Cockney-land, I had better consult some of the firm upon the subject, before we decide upon permanent ones. In the meantime, you and Willy must mind and keep in doors when I am not with you, or I shall have one or other of you lost in this great wilderness of a city. I shall return in two or three hours. ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... up his mind to that act, he is not ashamed to name it; neither, on the other hand, does he rant about it, and talk about Philistine prejudices and higher laws and brides in the sight of God, after the manner of the cockney decadent. He was breaking a social law, but he was not declaring a crusade against social laws. We all feel, whatever may be our opinions on the matter, that the great danger of this kind of social opportunism, this pitting of a private necessity against ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... and waving hats and handkerchiefs. It may have been on 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 ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... Keats's work was bitterly and unjustly condemned by the critics of his day. He belonged to what was derisively called the cockney school of poetry, of which Leigh Hunt was chief, and Proctor and Beddoes were fellow-workmen. Not even from Wordsworth and Byron, who were ready enough to recommend far less gifted writers, did Keats ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... he declared, "she's here." He was unaware that his failure to be cockney was ruining his standing. Amory considered ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... shrill. The little 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 ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... quizzing me on my plans, partly in Yiddish and partly in broken English, which he uttered with a strong Cockney accent, a relic of the several years he had ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... born in London and still a cockney, has succeeded in extracting thrills from the alphabet—imparting excitement to the names of the national capitol's streets. On a recent Sunday morning he ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... our pouched pugilist, though his chance looks poor, Will come up smiling soon, surviving failure; And an admiring ring will shout once more, (Pardon the Cockney rhyme!) ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... Army's point of view, the humour of this story, it must always be remembered that the regiment concerned is an English one—entirely and emphatically English, and indeed almost entirely East End Cockney. ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... up to going back to the Hotel just yet. The shops, which are small and rather dimly lighted, depress me. There is no theatre, nor cafe chantant open apparently. If there were, I haven't the heart for them to-night. Hear music from a small estaminet in a back street; female voice, with fine Cockney accent, is singing "Oh, dem Golden Slippers!" Wonder ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various
... cargo of best steaming coal for Kamrangh Bay. This knowledge enabled Togo to destroy the Baltic fleet in the Tushima Straits. And a stevedore made something like a million dollars out of a cargo of canned salmon by hearing some cockney give his theory about how the blockade could be run to ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... think of the way the British government treats the Irish, and then you look on while an orderly sergeant calls the roll of a company, and find that nine out of ten answer to Irish names, and only one out of ten has the cockney accent, you feel that the Irish ought to rule England, and an O'Rourke or a O'Shaunnessy should take the place of King Edward. It makes a boy who was brought up in an Irish ward in America feel like he was at home to mix with British soldiers who come from ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... certainly, the best fed, the best dressed, and the best trained. The fact that he speaks English is not unexpected in spite of the Spanish landscape; for with the exception of one man who might be guessed as a bullfighter ruined by drink and one unmistakable Frenchman, they are all cockney or American; therefore, in a land of cloaks and sombreros, they mostly wear seedy overcoats, woollen mufflers, hard hemispherical hats, and dirty brown gloves. Only a very few dress after their leader, whose broad sombrero with a cock's feather in the band, and voluminous cloak descending to his ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... in his bitterness cries out that "the town has overflowed the country," meaning the whole country, and that "we are cockney from sea to sea," he is being tragic at the cost of truth. Would he drag Wiltshire and all the pastoral West into his turmoil? You may go about any of the villages here, watch the daily doings of the inhabitants, and feel ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... walked shyly along the iron fence for a quarter of a mile before he got up courage to go back, rush through the towering iron gateway and past the gate-house, into the sacred estate. He expected to hear a voice—it would be a cockney servant's voice—demanding, "'Ere you, wot do you want?" But no one stopped him; no one spoke to him; he was safe among the rhododendrons. He clumped along as though he had important business, secretly patting his tie into shape and smoothing his hair. Just let anybody ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... was made 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 coo-ee, which was answered ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... merit, though not, as we should now consider, in the first rank of the great caricaturists, had proposed to Messrs. Chapman and Hall, then just starting on their career as publishers, a "series of Cockney sporting plates." Messrs. Chapman and Hall entertained the idea favourably, but opined that the plates would require illustrative letter-press; and casting about for some suitable author, bethought themselves ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... 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 for a Northern Visit, which represents ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... cottage, or lose the opportunity of listening without intermission to the melody of the nightingale, which he believed was to be heard from every bramble, and which he did not fail to mention as a very important part of the happiness of a country life." In London, this insincere cockney adopts Savage's view. Thales, who is generally supposed to represent Savage (and this coincidence seems to confirm the opinion), is to retire "from the dungeons of the Strand," and to end a healthy life in pruning walks and ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... Coleraine (Famed for lovely Kitty), Came a Cockney bound Unto Derry city; Weary was his soul, Shivering and sad he Bumped along the ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... not want their assistance; he had fixed on a person to take charge of his measure in the House of Commons. This person was a member who was not connected with the government, and who neither had, nor deserved to have, the ear of the House, a noisy, purse-proud, illiterate demagogue, whose Cockney English and scraps of mispronounced Latin were the jest of the newspapers, Alderman Beckford. It may well be supposed that these strange proceedings produced a ferment through the whole political world. The city was in commotion. The East India Company invoked ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... she-Cockney by his side entertained him with the flow of her chatter; it had the advantage of making him feel ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... 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 have supposed ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... must not be left behind! It must go to the grave with the fleet limbs! and over it should rise a monument, at sight of which every friendly highlandman would say, Feiich an cabracli mor de Clanruadli! What a mockery of fate to be exposed for ever to the vulgar Cockney gaze, the trophy of a fool, whose boast was to kill! Such a noble beast! Such a mean man! To mutilate his remains for the pride of the wretch who killed him! ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... back they were disgusted, and said there was a ginger-beer woman and a man with the game of "Aunt Sally," and a crowd of cockney excursionists round them and the Stone. Talk ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... before anyone seated there could give vent to his resentment at this boisterous intrusion of the men from the rival camp, the smooth, oily and inviting voice of the unprincipled Sidney Duck, scenting easy prey because of their inebriated condition, called out in its cockney accent: ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... mother could see me now," Bill the Cockney remarked. "My, she wouldn't think me 'alf a cove. It's a balmy. I discovered the (p. ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... with the summit of Primrose-hill, St. Paul's in the distance, and a gentleman with black clothes, and literary habits, reading in the foreground. This turns out to be "The Laird Lawson," Barbara's favoured lover and benevolent duellist. Though on the top of Cockney Mount, he is suffering under a deep depression of spirits; for he has never seen Miss Allen during four years, come next Fairlop-fair. Having heard this, the audience is, of course, quite prepared for that lady's appearance; and, sure ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 25, 1841 • Various
... the best conclusions of modern scholarship, and to urge his own fanciful or shallow theories. He treats all human superstitions and mythologies as if he were standing in the Strand and judging them by the ideas of modern London. His is a Cockney's view of antiquity. He cannot imagine that a barbarous and infant people, groping in the mysteries of the moral universe, might entertain some earnest and poetic views which were not precisely ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... train which shall convey me thither. I begin to understand the nostalgia of the mountain herdsman: I pine for that northern air, those fresh pure breezes blowing over moor and wold—though I am not quite clear, by the bye, as to the exact nature of a wold. I pant, I yearn for Yorkshire. I, the cockney, the child of Temple Bar, whose cradle-song was boomed by the bells of St. Dunstan's and ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... stagnation. Men like myself prefer to be at the heart of things—to live close to the centre of activity. London is the nucleus of England; not only the seat of government, but the focus of intellect, of art, of culture, of all that makes life worth living; and please do not put me down as a cockney, Miss Lambert, if I confess that I love these crowded streets. I am a lawyer, you know, and ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... we are, under the shadow of the departed Nine Elms and of the official palace of the Odos, deep enough in Lunnon to satisfy the proudest Cockney, in less time than we have taken in getting off that last commonplace on political economy. Adam Smith and Jefferson never undertook to meditate at thirty-five ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... exquisite little dogs in between. And the lady chattered. Her voice was sweet and full, with plaintive tones and turns of laughter in it; and, though the vowel sounds were not wholly impeccable, having the tang in them common to the speech of the cockney bred, the aspirates happily remained inviolate. And Iglesias listened, still with a curious indifference, as, sitting in the body of the house, he might have listened to patter from the other side of the footlights. It passed the time. Presently he would get up, taking ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... disguise the fact that the delinquent I speak of (I had almost written renegade) is an Irishman. No wonder that he should attempt the disguise, for he must deeply feel his delinquency. In all cases such as this, the Cockney twang and occasional curtailment is assumed to overcome the brogue, but in vain. For the first half dozen words of each paragraph in a conversation it gets on well enough, but the conclusion ...
— Facts for the Kind-Hearted of England! - As to the Wretchedness of the Irish Peasantry, and the Means for their Regeneration • Jasper W. Rogers
... 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
... beaming, while the child wailed his way through a song of some eight eight-line verses in the usual whine of a young Cockney, and, after compliments, left him to read Dick the foreign telegrams. Ten minutes later Alf returned to his parents rather pale ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... wonderland—a medley of Colon and Cristobal, Panama and the Canal Zone of 1907; Spiggoty policemen like monkeys chattering bad Spanish, and big, smiling Canal Zone policemen in khaki, with the air of soldiers; Jamaica negroes with conical heads and brown Barbados negroes with Cockney accents; English engineers in lordly pugrees, and tourists from New England who seem servants of their own tortoise-shell spectacles; comfortable ebon mammies with silver bangles and kerchiefs of stabbing scarlet, dressed ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... autumnal afternoon she walked with slow steps, while the river went murmuring by, and now and then a boat drifted lazily down the stream. The boating season was over for the most part—the season of picnics and beanfeasts, and Cockney holiday-making, and noisy revelry, smart young women, young men in white flannels, with bare arms and sunburnt noses. It was the dull blank time when everybody who could afford to wander far from this suburban paradise, was away upon his and her travels. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Sybil's entreaties the cab-driver hurried on. With all the skilled experience of a thorough cockney charioteer he tried to conquer time and space by his rare knowledge of short cuts and fine acquaintance with unknown thoroughfares. He seemed to avoid every street which was the customary passage of mankind. ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... 'There's cockney, and there's country, and there's school. Mix the three, strain and throw away the sediment. Now yon's ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... 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 astonished in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... your pardin', sir,' said he, in the softly insinuating way of the Cockney, 'but I thought that maybe the lidy would like to see Mr. Carlyle's statue. That's 'im, sir, a-sittin' in the overcoat with ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... inclined to imitate the Cockney frivolity of Barry Cornwall, who never went to sea in his life, but who nevertheless carolled the most absurdly joyous lays regarding the ocean, which made him ill even when he merely looked at it. No; the true sea-lover knows that there are terror and mystery and horror as well as joyousness ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... 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 over the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... jibed the diminutive cockney, putting a rail between himself and Lewis. "The 'uzzy! The minute I lays my heye on that marm, I says, 'Blime yer, you ain't no lydy'! I say, governor, ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... Scottish; nor could his accent undeceive me. For as there is a lingua franca of many tongues on the moles and in the feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there is a free or common accent among English-speaking men who follow the sea. They catch a twang in a New England Port; from a cockney skipper, even a Scotsman sometimes learns to drop an h; a word of a dialect is picked up from another hand in the forecastle; until often the result is undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man's place of birth. So it was with Mr. Jones. I thought him a Scotsman who had been long to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... confusion of tongues that reached him he could, on occasions, catch the tones of Spaniard, Frenchman, Swede, and Italian, together with all the varieties of English speech from Highland Scotch to Cockney; but none of the intonations of his native land. The comparative rarity of anything American in his city of refuge, while it added to his sense of exile, heightened his feeling of security. It was still another of the happy circumstances ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... "Charles Lamb 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
... of spirit. Jimmy had 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
... during Henley week discovered the "Ammurikins," as they called us, and we had our first encounter that night with the Thames nigger, a creature painfully unlike that delightful commodity at home. The Thames nigger is generally a cockney covered with blackening, which only alters his skin and does not change his accent. To us it sounded deliciously funny to hear this self-styled African call us "Leddies," and say "Halways" and say "'Aven't yer, now?" They sang ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... not to say neglected, in order to send her own brother to college, knows vastly more of those things than he does. The same exposure awaits him wherever he goes, and whenever he has the audacity to open his mouth. At sea he is a landlubber; in the country a cockney; in town a greenhorn; in science an ignoramus; in business a simpleton; in pleasure a milksop—everywhere out of his element, everywhere at sea, in the clouds, adrift, or by whatever word utter ignorance and incapacity are to be described. In society ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... to come out along the hedge of the private grounds that bordered that bit of Cockney Common, and from it, warmed by the sun, the scent stole up to her. Familiar, like so many children of the cultured classes, with the pagan and fairy-tales of nature, she forgot them all the moment she was really ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... cockney negative was also an exclamation. It came from Mrs. Courage, the cook-housekeeper, who stood near the kitchen range making the coffee for breakfast. She was a woman who looked her name, born not merely to do battle, but to enjoy being in the midst ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... only the dampness and the incessant maxim fire we had to contend with here, but an army of insects, which jumped about us in battalions, and saw to it we were never lonely. A Cockney member of our company, after catching a particularly active jumper, called out: "Now then, you ...
— A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire • Harold Harvey |
