"Cockney" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... the public buildings I saw were spacious and shabby beyond all cockney belief. Adjoining the Imperial Hotel is a great, large, handsome, desolate reading-room, which was founded by a body of Cork merchants and tradesmen, and is the very picture of decay. Not Palmyra—not the Russell Institution ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... my doubled fist. He stared right through me. So did the others as they joined him. The old man went and peered under the bed, and then they all made a rush for the cupboard. They had to argue about it at length in Yiddish and Cockney English. They concluded I had not answered them, that their imagination had deceived them. A feeling of extraordinary elation took the place of my anger as I sat outside the window and watched these four people—for the ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... His Cockney accent, too, was wiped out as if by magic. Probably he had forgotten for the instant that he had used it in Locking. At any rate, he did not use it now. But his English was perfect, in word and tone—the English of ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... observe the attempt made, in addition, to 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 is ...
— Facts for the Kind-Hearted of England! - As to the Wretchedness of the Irish Peasantry, and the Means for their Regeneration • Jasper W. Rogers
... 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!" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various
... the captain, but he directed me to the barber, who, he said, knew everything—and indeed there are very few things he doesn't know. He is a dignified figure with a shiny curl on his forehead, and a rich Cockney accent, full of information, generally, I must admit, strikingly inaccurate, but bestowed with such an air. "I do believe him though I know ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... 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 ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... besides, he wished Miss Selby to have leisure for leaving her home of many years; after which there would be a few needful repairs. The delay was not a great grievance to any of us except little Martyn. We were much more Cockney than almost any one is in these days of railways. We were unusually devoid of kindred on both sides, my father's holidays were short, I was not a very movable commodity, and economy forbade long journeys, so that we had never gone farther than Ramsgate, where we claimed ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... speedily arrived to take possession, bringing with him a spick-and-span new fishing-rod and basket. He did not know much about fishing, but he enjoyed himself just as thoroughly as if he did; and he laughed so good-humouredly at his own Cockney blunders, as he called them, that Thomas would have been quite angry had any one else presumed to indulge a smile at Mr Budge's expense. A pattern lodger in all respects was Mr Budge—deferential towards Martha and myself, and from the first moment he beheld Miss Marion, regarding her as ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... belt in Hinjer last year, they say," continued the Cockney. "Good? Not'arf. I wouldn't go an' hinsult the bloke for the price of a pot. No. 'Erbert 'Awker would not. (Chuck us yore button-stick, young 'Enery Bone.) Good? 'E's a 'Oly Terror—and I don't know as there's a man in the Queen's Greys as could put 'im to sleep—not unless it's Matthewson," ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... the South Seas and them islands was full of queer happenings, anyhow. Said that Eri's yarn reminded him of one that Jule Sparrow used to tell. There was a Cockney in that yarn, too, and a South Sea woman and a schooner. But in other respects the ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... was the foreman, and a Cockney sort of chap he be. He turns round in the box and, ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... 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 ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... vacation approaches, the cockney angler, the "inveterate cockney," as Lord Salisbury did or did not say, begins to look to his fishing tackle. Now comes in the sweet of the year, and we may regret, with Mr. Swinburne, that "such sweet things should be fleet, such fleet things ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... kind of these fellows I think, asking me to join them. A doubtful bag doesn't matter—it's a new country and I feel as keen as a cockney on his first 12th—so I unpack my American automatic five shooter, beside which all last year's single-trigger double-barrel hammer-less ejectors are as flintlocks! "Murderous weapon, and bloodthirsty shooter"—some old-fashioned gunners of to-day will say, just as our grandfathers spoke when ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... 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
... settled that fancy. I'm told they shoot their harpoons out of a gun nowadays—poor sport that! And there's no sport like whalin'. Two thousand pounds at one end of a line and your own life at the other- -that's finer sport than these Cockney partridge-shooters ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... people ought 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 ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... harder than ever to locate; but it also meant that I might float right over the worst of them if I hit off a lucky place.' Davies thumped the table in disgust. 'Pah! It makes me sick to think of having to trust to an accident like that, like a lubberly cockney out for a boozy Bank Holiday sail. Well, just as I foresaw, the wall of surf appeared clean across the horizon, and curling back to shut me in, booming like thunder. When I last saw the Medusa she seemed to ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... piercingly 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 of the Sitwell group, songs ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... not, in these days of cockney tours and “Cook” couriers? At any rate, one that we, with plenty of time on our hands and a weakness for out-of-the-way corners and untrodden paths, ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... 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
... out into the world, for it appeared to him a great evil that while all the rest of his companions were continually discoursing of their adventures, he should have none to mention of his own. Some of them, also, having slightingly called him Cockney and reproaching him with never having been seven miles from London, he remembered that his father had some near relations in the west of England, so he took a sudden resolution of going down thither to work at his trade. Full of these notions he went over one evening pretty late with his brother ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... upon an original Polynesian theme, "Zulu Lulu," was to feel like Keats's watcher of the skies, "when a new planet swims into his ken." For the admirer of Spanish customs there was A. E. J. Inglis (O.A.) to sing, as only he can, the Toreador's song; while for the Cockney there was Killick to give, in his own inimitable fashion, that really touching little ballad "My Old Dutch," Ould Oireland being well catered for by Livock in "A Little Irish Girl." The pianoforte solos by Nalder, Jacob and Shirley were all excellent and thoroughly ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... where CROOKBACK raged, and CRANMER trimmed, And MORE and STRAFFORD faced the axe's proving, He shows that Crown the desperate Colonel nimmed, Or simply keeps the Country Cousin moving, Or stays such Cockney pencillers as would shame The wall where some dead Queen hath traced ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... Mildred's associations made 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 ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... speak fair English, and I have engaged two good German-American mates who speak German. Reardon has shipped German-American engineers and some of his coal passers and firemen speak fair English. I've got two Native Son Chinamen in the galley and a Cockney steward. ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... 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 ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... and imagery. It may be doubted if there exists anything more comical; but each of the companion sonnets is good in its way. The egotism, which was a constant reproach urged by The Edinburgh critics and by the "Cockney Poets" against the poets of the Lake School, is splendidly hit off in the first sonnet; the low and creeping meanness, or say, simpleness, as contrasted with simplicity, of thought and expression, which was stealing into Wordsworth's work at that period, is equally ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... exploits was fishing with a bent pin. Another was to preach a little sermon on a naughty fish. The "application," though brief, was earnest. To the infant expounder, the subject of his discourse doubtless appeared in the guise of a piscatorial Cockney. After many other the like foreshadowings, and after draining dry his native village, he went, when twelve years of age, to Glasgow University. Professor Jardine, who then held the chair of Logic, was fully alive to the rare promise of his pupil, and said of him subsequently,—"He ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... Commentaries, it behoved every globe-trotter, for whatever distance, to describe to the best of his ability the things that he had seen. Dr. Johnson, familiar with little else than the view down Fleet Street, could read the description of a Yorkshire moor with pleasure and with profit. To a cockney who had never seen higher ground than the Hog's Back in Surrey, an account of Snowdon must have appeared exciting. But we, or rather the steam-engine and the camera for us, have changed all that. The man ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... 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
... by the natives, "Fleen" by etymologists, and "Flegney" by the rare intrusive Cockney—had doubtless been a prosperous little port, but the encroaching sea had long since killed its trade, scattered its inhabitants, and reduced it to a spectre of human habitation compelled to keep the scene of its ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... addressed 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 ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... 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
... far from Liverpool to have been much injured as yet by the novelty of cockney residences, which have grown up almost everywhere else, so far as I have visited. About a mile from it, however, is the landing-place of a steamer (which runs regularly, except in the winter months), where a large, new hotel is built. The grounds about it are extensive ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and mist; their dainty robes, still more or less unsullied, gleam ghostly in the gaslight athwart the dark. They make a brave show even in winter with their feathery branches and swinging tassels, whereas my little tree stands stark and uncompromising, with its horde of sooty sparrows cockney to the last tail feather, and a pathetic inability to look anything but black. Rain comes with strong caressing fingers, and the branches seem no whit the cleaner for her care; but then their glistening blackness mirrors ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... us children," 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 ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... afraid,—in measure as they love all experience of vitality. Here I beheld myself some paces ahead (seeing myself, I mean, from behind) utterly alone in that uncanny passage: on the one side of me a rude, knobby shepherd's staff, such as cheers the heart of the cockney tourist, on the other a rod like a billiard cue, appeared to accompany my progress: the staff sturdily upright, the billiard cue inclined confidentially, like one whispering, towards my ear. I was aware—I will never tell you how—that the presence of these articles afforded me encouragement. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ashes of that doughty champion, William Walworth, Knight, who so manfully clove down the sturdy wight, Wat Tyler, in Smithfield—a hero worthy of honorable blazon, as almost the only Lord Mayor on record famous for deeds of arms, the sovereigns of Cockney being generally renowned as the most pacific ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... saying:—"There now, you be off; you come when I tell you; you'll find me a regular old screw; and if you don't pay your rent the day it is due I shall law you for it, so be off." Mrs. C—- then said, "My husband is a cockney, and I will bring him with me, and we will see if we can't turn the screw the right way." The ladies had no sooner arrived at the end of Mason-street, when on turning to take a last look of their singular friend they saw the ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... grove, the rotund horse-chestnut trees, venerable and solemn, nearly a century old—to this day a horse-chestnut always seems to me like a theological trustee—and the sweep of playground so vast, so soft, so green, so fragrant, so clean, that the baby cockney ran imperiously to her father and demanded that he go build her a brick sidewalk ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... by 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. Standfast • John Buchan
... heard the first dismal warning. For some reason or other I had to go down into the basement of the school. The janitor, a highly efficient but exceedingly bad-humoured cockney, who was dissatisfied with all things Canadian because "in the old country we do things differently"—whose sharp tongue was feared by many, and who once remarked to a lady teacher in the most casual way, "If you was a lidy, ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... little credit to the Lunnon boys if they lets 'im get avay vithout a vacking.' So Figg he ups, and he says, 'I do not know, master, but he may break one of 'is countrymen's jawbones vid 'is vist, but I'll bring 'im a Cockney lad and 'e shall not be able to break 'is jawbone with a sledge 'ammer.' I was with Figg in Slaughter's coffee-'ouse, as then vas, ven 'e says this to the King's genelman, and I goes so, I does!" Again he emitted ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... scene, with the beautiful wintry landscape stretching away to the cloudy November sky, and the lords and ladies gay, and the hounds, and the frosty-faced, short-tempered old huntsman, the very perfection of his kind; and the poor cockney snobs on their hired screws, and the meek clod-hopping labourers looking on excited and bewildered, happy for a moment at beholding so ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... friend; and very pleasant it was to hear pretty thoughts expressed in pretty language, and from pretty lips. I could perceive that she thought me a little rustic and provincial; but I had not been all the way to Canton to be brow-beaten by a cockney girl, however clever and handsome. On the whole—and I say it without vanity, at this late day—I think the impression left behind me, among these good people, was favourable. Perhaps Clawbonny was not without its influence; but, when I paid my last visit, even Emily looked ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... excited staring eyes of a fanatic, and his hair now very scanty, was plastered over his head in black shining streaks. He wore a rather faded black suit, a white low collar and a white bow tie. He had a habit, at moments of stress, of cracking his fingers. He had a very pronounced cockney accent when he was excited, at other times he struggled against ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... tottered in his saddle, but quickly recovered. Instantly Perkins was up again, the blood streaming from the side of his head. He was conscious of brown hands clutching at the cricketer, to drag him away. He himself seized the cockney's legs and braced for that absurd and deadly tug of war. Then Von Plaanden's saber descended, and he was able to ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to go suddenly flapping his way through the streets of London on the long-anticipated flying-machine, the average Cockney would scarce betray the unfeigned astonishment that is depicted on the countenances of these Croatian villagers as we nde into their ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... entered Block B of the flats, and turned, not upstairs, but down, into what is known to house agents as a semi-basement, and to other men as a cellar. He opened the door, and cried "Hullo!" with the pseudo-geniality of the Cockney. There was no reply. "Hullo!" he repeated. The sitting-room was empty, though the electric light had been left burning. A look of relief came over his face, and he ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... storm 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 ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... created these animals simply for our service, assuredly bountiful Nature left them in ignorance of the fact. And it is to the sportsman and the colt-breaker that we must apply, if we wish to know whose victims are the most willing. Not to the cockney casuist, whose knowledge of the stag is confined to his venison, and who never trusts himself on the horse till it has been "long trained, in shackles, to procession pace." If he did, he would find that the unfettered four-year-old shows precisely the same alarm and resistance ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... on the 8th in 1754. Battle of Agincourt on the 25th—an awful example to habitual drunkards. Pheasant-shooting commences. Right time to tell that story about the Cockney who, dropping his "h's," shot peasants instead! This well-worn jest will be still found attractive by Australians who have spent the better part of their ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., January 3, 1891. • Various
... "You're a cockney at 'eart, Annie," repeated that functionary. "The country says nothing to you. You want the parks, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... giant with a dozen or so to his account, was full of pity for the poor little Cockney. 'Mon, mon,' he said, 'I can hardly believe ye. Why, never a single one? Not ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... that they can do nothing properly, the servants are so stupid; when they come down late, that they were not called in time; or, if they have not learned their lessons, that the room was not ready. I daresay, when the Cockney sportsman returned with an empty gamebag, he abused the stupid ...
— Stories of Animal Sagacity • W.H.G. Kingston
... teach them,—let us be content to waive them. There are attractive qualities in Burns, and attractive qualities in Dickens, which neither of those writers would have possessed if the one had been educated, and the other had been studying higher nature than that of cockney London; but those attractive qualities are not such as we should seek in a school of literature. If we want to teach young men a good manner of writing, we should teach it from Shakspeare,—not from Burns; from Walter Scott,— and not from Dickens. And I believe that ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... 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 that ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... imaginable suburbs or settlements within eight or ten miles of the town. These districts have the quaintest French names—Beau Bassin, Curepipe, Pamplemousse, Flacq, Moka, and so forth, with the English name of "Racehill" standing out among them in cockney simplicity. My particular suburb is the nearest and most convenient from which F—— can compass his daily official duties, but I am not entitled to boast of an elevation of more than eight hundred feet. Still, there is an extraordinary difference in the temperature before ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... 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 mouth. Pelle ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... 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 ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... Patient as a cat waiting for its chin to be stroked the conductor sat with extended baton. Down to the footlights she minced, delicately as Agag to the downfall of his hopes, thrust out an impudent face, and waggled it. "I can't! You know I can't!" she remonstrated in a shrill cockney wail. And straight on the anticipated word the house roared its applause. Off pranced the singer to her encore on cavorting toes, down flourished the conductor's baton in a crash of chords, and away to its fortunes sailed the play, more ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... may have been a few months later—Mr. W. Beatty Kingston made an early appearance with a cockney ballad on the subject of the admission of female searchers to the penetralia of H.M. Record Office, of which at that time he was a "flickering light" at L100 a year. Soon he took service under the Hapsburgs, and left England afterwards for nearly a quarter ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... at it again!" cried Rowles; "these cockney boatmen, how they do try to drown themselves! Hold hard!" he shouted to the ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... once beside Michael and Nicholas and John. George was also in white flannels; he played furiously and well; he played too furiously and too consciously well; he was too damp and too excited; his hair became damp and excited as he played; his cries had a Cockney tang. ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... a great distance from London, and, as a consequence, many of London's choicest blackguards migrated there from time to time. During the hopping season, and while the local races were on, one might meet with two Cockney ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 left eye on it. ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... might be the sentiments of an eager speculator who found himself among primitive folk. But the discord of ideas puts the whole piece so completely out of tune as to produce only a harsh and jarring sensation; the rough Western man is thoroughly out of his element, and flounders heavily, like a cockney among mediaeval crusaders. This must be taken in fairness to be the result of collaboration, for in his own short stories Mr. Kipling never commits solecisms of the kind; on the contrary, he excels in the shading of strong local colours, and in the rapid, unerring delineation ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the collar of his mackintosh, and walked to the police station, where he heard a little of the matter in hand from a constable and then asked for permission to use the telephone. In five minutes he was speaking to his own chief at Scotland Yard, and the familiar cockney voice of Inspector Harrison came over the two hundred odd miles that separated the metropolis of convicts from ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... 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 spent ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... 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
... bored. This seemed a very poor sort of man; a bloated Cockney, with a dirty neck-cloth, vile cuffs of grayish black, and a waistcoat ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... 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 mode of treatment it adopts. It is, to be sure, more decent and ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... one of us, but she is like us all the same, and I'll be sorely grieved if she'll give up her light-heartedness and her pleasantry to win that Cockney.' ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... They are tired and hungry and footsore. More than one falls back where he sits and drops into a sleep of utter exhaustion. But of any serious grumbling or discontent there is no sign. A few curse at the heat perhaps, but their hardships are mostly a subject for rough chaff and Cockney jokes. You thought you were roughing it a good deal, but look at the state these men are in. You gave yourself credit for some endurance, but look at their unaffected cheeriness. The whole army is the same. In their thousands, as you ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... they wanted. "Slim Piet" is the universal nickname for old Joubert among friends and enemies alike, and so far he has well deserved it. For the Dutch "slim" stands half way between the German "schlimm" and our description of young girls, and it means exactly what the Cockney means by "artful." Artful Piet has managed well. He has given the Boers an appearance of triumph. Their flag waves where the English flag waved before. The effect on the native mind, and on the spirits of his men is greater than people in England probably think. Before the war the young Boers ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... came 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
... The Quarterly notice is of so much import in the life and death of Keats, and in the genesis of Adonais, that I shall give it, practically in extenso, before closing this section of my work: with Blackwood I can deal at once. A series of articles On the Cockney School of Poetry began in this magazine in October, 1817, being directed mainly and very venomously against Leigh Hunt. No. 4 of the series appeared in August, 1818, falling foul of Keats. It is difficult to say whether the priority in abusing Keats should of right be assigned to Blackwood ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... of them were misfits, out-of-works, the kind of men 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 ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... 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 ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... answer for a while, but now my curiosity was aroused about the repulsive young man below and I pressed him. Three years' sojourn in America had not only modified Thomas' cockney dialect but had given him the American's fear ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... for Mrs. Nevill Tyson, Stanistreet might have been faintly amused at the idea of this little cockney cosmopolitan persuading himself that his contemptible vices were part of the pageant of the world. As it was he was disgusted. He, too, was a sinner in all conscience; but his sins and his repentance had been alike simple and sincere. He had none ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... whiskey's gone to yer noddle. Come here!" And Cassidy led him, wondering, to the barred corridor without and slammed the door behind them. "Not a word do you whisper of this to any man, Pat Quinlan," said he, never relaxing his grasp. "You heard what that Cockney Fitzroy was swearin' to this morning? Sure—you'd never say the word to back that whelp—an' ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... any one enjoy anything as you enjoy this music," she said to me. She spoke well, perhaps rather too carefully, and with a hint of the cockney accent. ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... mistake is reported from South London. A thoroughly patriotic man was sat upon by a Cockney crowd for declaring that ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... sometimes brutal joy in the present. Kipling gloried in the material world; he did more—he glorified it. He pierced the coarse exteriors of seemingly prosaic things—things like machinery, bridge-building, cockney soldiers, slang, steam, the dirty by-products of science (witness "M'Andrews Hymn" and "The Bell Buoy")—and uncovered their hidden glamour. "Romance is gone," sighed ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... work well; but of an evening he used to drink more than was good for him, and rave about Shelley, his only poet. He would recite "The Skylark" (his only poem) with uncertain h's, and a rather cockney accent— ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... vagabondage will come from the children themselves. For them freedom will not mean the expensive kind of savagery now called "the simple life." Their natural disgust with the visions of cockney book fanciers blowing themselves out with "the wind on the heath, brother," and of anarchists who are either too weak to understand that men are strong and free in proportion to the social pressure ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... 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
... 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 and in the work of life, he finds himself ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... on. "Now a horse is different, you never get tired of a good one. He don't fizzle out1 like the rest. You like him better and better every day. He seems a part of yourself; he is your better half, your 'halter hego' as I heard a cockney once call his ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... hat in hand, and bowed as he stood on the threshold. He was a very short man—snub-nosed; rusty-whiskered; indubitably and unimpressively a cockney in appearance. He might have walked out ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... burning contempt; and on Abelard he pours out the vials of his wrath. He has a quick eye for all humbugs and a scorching scorn for them; but there is no attempt at being funny in the manner of the cockney comedians when he stands in the awful presence of the Sphinx. He is not taken in by the glamor of Palestine; he does not lose his head there; he keeps his feet; but he knows that he is standing on holy ground; and there is never a hint of irreverence ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... this 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 a prose Browning. Charlotte Bronte and Kingsley could both descend to blue ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... soft voices of these coolies?—you can't hear them with the naked ear, three feet off. The most hideous demon (whose complexion had not only the colour, but the precise metallic lustre of an ill black-leaded stove) at last chirruped a wish for orders, which I gave. I asked the pert, active, cockney housemaid what I ought to pay them, as, being a stranger, they might overcharge me. Her scorn was sublime, 'Them nasty blacks never asks more than their regular charge.' So I asked the black-lead demon, who demanded 'two shilling each horse in waggon', ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... cruel and barbarous race; and, on this account alone, I have often been ashamed, 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 ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... describe as being utterly without nerves, who goes down badly. Something snaps in him. He has no resilience in his nervous system. He has never trained himself in nerve-control, being so stolid and self-reliant. Now, the nervous man, the cockney, for example, is always training himself in the control of his nerves, on 'buses which lurch round corners, in the traffic that bears down on him, in a thousand and one situations which demand self-control in a 'nervy' man. That helps him ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... with your knee-brakes refusing to work, your thighs creaking, your joints spavined. The views were wonderful. But, oh, the price he paid! The air was intoxicating. But what, he asked himself, was wine to a dead man! Miserable little cockney that he was he told himself a hundred times a day that if he ever survived this he'd never look at another view again, unless from the Woolworth Tower, on a calm day. He thought of New York as a traveller, ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... and Drevis Jonkers found himself described in full in the novel as "Drevis Noordhof," and playing a leading part in the story. Can you imagine the simple sailor's surprise and delight? Pleased beyond measure, in his soft Dutch accent liberally flavoured with cockney he told the bookseller how Mr. McFee had befriended him, had urged him to go on studying navigation so that he might become an officer; and that though they had not met for several years he still receives letters from his friend, full of good advice about saving his money, where ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... provincials differ in character, dialect, and pronunciation from one another, but also the inhabitants of some cities differ in these respects from those of other cities. An educated Dutchman can tell at once if a man comes from Amsterdam, Rotterdam, or The Hague. The 'cockney' of these places differs, and of such pronunciations 'Hague Dutch' is considered the worst, although—true to the analogy of London—the best Dutch is heard in The Hague. This difference in 'civic' pronunciation ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... in the character of the old pedlar, in the Excursion. The origin of Keats might be assumed to have its share in molding poets' views on caste, but only the most insensitive have dared to touch upon his Cockney birth. In the realm of Best Sellers, however, the hero of May Sinclair's novel, The Divine Fire, who is presumably modeled after Keats, is a lower class Londoner, presented with the most unflinching realism that the author can achieve. Consummate indeed is the artistry with which she enables him ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... stated, 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 receive the slightest ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... smattering of everything and mastery of nothing; affecting the dictator, the poet, the politician, the critic, and the sceptic, whichever would, at the moment, give him the air, to inferior minds, of a very superior man.' Although Haydon disliked Hunt's 'Cockney peculiarities,' and disapproved of his republican principles, yet the fearless honesty of his opinions, the unhesitating sacrifice of his own interests, the unselfish perseverance of his attacks upon all abuses, whether royal or religious, noble or democratic, made a deep impression ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... in Livery: or the Footman's Miscellany. 1732. A rhyme in the motto on the title-page shows what a Cockney muse Dodsley's was. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... from Coleraine (Famed for lovely Kitty), Came a Cockney bound Unto Derry city; Weary was his soul, Shivering and sad, he Bumped along ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Godfrey to 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 sudden report ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... no longer ashamed, his sense of kinship grew warmer, and his lips were opened. It is this sense of kinship that the traveller must rouse and share; or he had better content himself with travels from the blue bed to the brown. And the presence of one Cockney titterer will cause a whole party to walk in ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the platform-gate as herself a very tall, slim, dandy of an officer was bending over a smartly-dressed girl, smiling at her and whispering. Suddenly the girl turned from him with a disdainful toss of the head and said in a loud, clear Cockney voice: ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... was a Wapping man; a lively, impudent young Cockney, who had the most miraculous faculty of telling lies—not only palpable lies, but lies absolutely impossible: yet they were so sublimely told often, and he contrived to lug into them such a quantity of gorgeous tinsel ornament, as, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... the door between, of course. We always do. I'm such a cockney, I'm timid; and Melora's very sweet ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... 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. She herself a homeless woman, repudiated ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... chosen ought to be in good health: for it is absolutely barbarous to murder a sick person, who is usually quite unable to bear it. On this principle, no cockney ought to be chosen who is above twenty-five, for after that age he is sure to be dyspeptic. Or at least, if a man will hunt in that warren, he ought to murder a couple at one time; if the cockneys chosen should be tailors, he will of course think it his ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... it. All slang phrases are for the same reason vulgar; but there is nothing vulgar in the common English idiom. Simplicity is not vulgarity; but the looking to affectation of any sort for distinction is. A cockney is a vulgar character, whose imagination cannot wander beyond the suburbs of the metropolis; so is a fellow who is always thinking of the High Street, Edinburgh. We want a name for this last character. An opinion is vulgar that is stewed ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... the most delightful cities of Italy to visit, to live with, to return to again and again. Yet I for one would never live within her walls if I could help it, nor herd with those barbarian, exclamatory souls who in guttural German or cockney English snort or neigh at the beauties industriously pointed out by a loud-voiced cicerone, quoting in American all the appropriate quotations, Browning before Filippo Lippi, Ruskin in S. Croce, Mrs. Browning at the door of ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... 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 confident that, practically, there has been no substantial change since the ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... 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 we grew older, and of recognizing that, here and there, somebody ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... which slid upon the deck to the heave and fall of the old barque's blunt bows, and left in shadow the double row of bunks and the chests on which the men sat. From his seat nearest the ladder, Bill, the ship's inevitable Cockney, raised his ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... onyx, the jasper, the sapphire, emerald .... Thou was upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire." We would point out these radiant avenues of return; but sometimes we feel in our hearts that we sound but cockney choices, as guides amid the ancient temples, the cyclopean crypts sanctified by the mysteries. To be intelligible we replace the opalescent shining by the terms of the anatomist, and we speak of ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... he said much, and I hung upon every syllable that fell from his lips, but, to my indescribable chagrin, it was a mere voluble jargon of statements, which simply baffled and puzzled me and caused me pain. Our charge would stare at us stolidly, and then remark, in a vulgar Cockney voice, that he was quite sure we were going the wrong way. By this time, I should mention, we had re-clothed him in his trousers and shirt, for he had obviously suffered ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... from man as fishes—cold-blooded inhabitants of an element in which man exists only so long as he keeps on the surface; mute, incredible and incapable of exchanging any intercourse with him—why these should provide the Cockney, the dweller in the citiest City of the world, with so much of the material of jocoseness is an odd problem. But they do. Herrings, when cured either by smoke or sun, notoriously contribute to the low comedian's success. The mere word "kipper" has every girl in the gallery in a tittering ecstasy. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various
... sent him, picking his way among the orange boxes, the moving farms, and the wig-makers of Covent Garden, he had come upon a sculptor's shop, oddly crowded in among Cockney carters and decaying vegetables. Faces of Greece and Rome gazed at him suddenly from a broad window, and for a few moments he forsook the motley beauty of modern London for the ordered ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... morning 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 waking business ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... he asked. The soft sing-song intonation common to all Devon voices fell very pleasantly on ears accustomed to the Cockney twang of London streets. ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... known as Kilburn, had scarcely been called into existence a century ago, and an ancient hostel, with a few detached farmhouses, were the sole habitations to be found in the present populous vicinage. The place of refreshment for the ruralizing cockney of 1737 was a substantial-looking tenement of the good old stamp, with great bay windows, and a balcony in front, bearing as its ensign the jovial visage of the lusty knight, Jack Falstaff. Shaded by a spreading elm, a circular ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... information of a particular portion of my townsmen, who may have been under a certain delusion on the subject. As for comparing the Bay of New York with that of Naples on the score of beauty, I shall no more be guilty of any such folly, to gratify the cockney feelings of Broadway and Bond street, than I should be guilty of the folly of comparing the commerce of the ancient Parthenope with that of old New York, in order to excite complacency in the bosom of some bottegajo in the Toledo, or on the Chiaja. Our fast-growing Manhattan is a ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... into the British possessions, first around the mountain, which is quite a mountain for a villa, though nothing to speak of as a mountain, with several handsome residences on its sides, and a good many not so handsome; but the mountain is a pet of Montreal, and, as I said, quite the thing for a cockney mountain. Then we went to the French Cathedral, which is, I believe, the great gun of ecclesiastical North America, but it hung fire with me. It was large, but not great. There was no unity. It was not impressive. It was running over with ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... French, but he had learned to speak English in Jamaica. Thus his accent was a curious mixture of French and Cockney, lubricated with ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... from the road below. Having fallen into ruin, it had lately been repaired at the expense of the commune. To an Englishman the spot could not be otherwise than strangely interesting. I imagined my own language being spoken there five or six centuries ago, and speculated as to whether the accent was Cockney or Lancashire, or ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... feather as an added injury. Mrs. Sparrow chirped with delight at sight of the gaudy monstrosity. Having got the house cheap, they were going to spend their small amount of energy upon internal decoration. That was their idea clearly, a "Liberty interior." She looked more like a Cockney sparrow than a country one—had been born and bred in Regent ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... 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 ...
— 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
... pleasant, as healthy, as prolific of sport, as the famed Adironbacks, and at half the cost. But, for an all-summer canoe cruise, with more than 600 accessible lakes and ponds, the Northern Wilderness stands alone. And, as a wealthy cockney once remarked to me in Brown's Tract, "It's no ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... usually an Irishman or an Irishman's son. For two dollars and a half a day he will drive you to Melville Island, or Parry's Sound, if you will only stick by him; and he jogs along, smoking his dudeen, over corduroy roads, through mud holes that would astonish a cockney, and over sand and swamp, rocks and rough places enough to dislocate every joint in your body, all his own being anchylosed or used to it, which is the same ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... would have preferred Maunders to stay, but he let him go. Mr. Jarvice shut the door carefully, and, walking across the room, stood over his visitor with his hands in his pockets, and renewed his scrutiny. Walter Hine grew uncomfortable, and blurted out with a cockney twang— ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... plunder. Raffles had his own method of conducting this very vital branch of our business, which I was well content to leave entirely in his hands. He drove the bargains, I believe, in a thin but subtle disguise of the flashy-seedy order, and always in the Cockney dialect, of which he had made himself a master. Moreover, he invariably employed the same "fence," who was ostensibly a money-lender in a small (but yet notorious) way, and in reality a rascal as remarkable as Raffles himself. Only lately I also had ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... I lost my boy, and wasn't it these Cockney cads who turned him adrift in London? I ought to have gone to them last night. I wish I had, when my blood was up after your dinner; for I don't mind telling you now, Mr. Thrush, that in spite of your hospitality I was ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... you a little," thought Lancelot, with his whimsical look. "So it's missus, is it, who's taught you Cockneyese? My instinct was not so unsound, after all. I dare say you'll turn out something nobler than a Cockney drudge." He finished aloud, "I hope ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... 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 by herself with earth and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... A short bantam-like British Tommy was cursing and swearing volubly at a burly German sitting on the ground rubbing his head and groaning like a bull. Tommy, with a souvenir cigar in his mouth, was telling him in his best cockney English to get a ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... shepherd, a drover, a rat-catcher, a mole-catcher, and a hundred other things; in any one of which, he is as different from the sheepish, straw-hatted, and ankle-booted, bill-holding fellow of the print-shop windows, as a cockney is ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... Englishman says Thank you, sir; and one kind—the Cockney who has been educated—says Thenks; but the majority brief it into a short but expressive expletive and merely say: Kew. Kew is the commonest word in the British Isles. Stroidinary runs it a close second, but ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... walks in. 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
... not such a cockney place as the majority of men who have not visited it imagine. It really is larger than the Welsh Harp at Hendon, and the scenery, though not like that of Ben Cruachan or Ben Mohr, excels the landscape of Middlesex. At the northern end is a small town, ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... in their own green isle.—So are Scotchmen. Whereas, blindfolded, take a cockney's hand, immediately after it has been washed and scented, and put it to your nose—and you will begin to be apprehensive that some practical wit has substituted in lieu of the sonnet-scribbling bunch of little fetid fives, the body ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 277, October 13, 1827 • Various
... Harry—"that is just the most snobbish thing I ever saw you do; aint you ashamed of yourself now, you genuine cockney!" ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... foundation for the assertion that Dickens could not draw a lady or a gentleman, one discovers that his ladies and gentlemen, in the English sense, are deadly dull. It is very probable that all conventional ladies and gentlemen bored Dickens, who never ceased to be a cockney, though he became the most sublimated of that class. Doctor Johnson was a cockney, too, but, though it may seem paradoxical to say it, not so greatly impressed by ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... dressed or disreputably poorly dressed people, quite accustomed to the place, and mostly plodding about somebody else's work, which they would not do if they themselves could help it. The little energy and eagerness that crop up show themselves in cockney cupidity and business "push." Even the policemen and the chapels are not infrequent enough to break the monotony. The sun is shining cheerfully; there is no fog; and though the smoke effectually prevents anything, whether faces and hands or bricks and mortar, from looking ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw |
