"Costermonger" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... care, and yet has nothing to do; the African master of the horse has also nothing to do, for the very best of all reasons, that he has no horses to take care of, the whole African stud consisting of one or two half-starved, ragged ponies, which would disgrace a costermonger's cart in the streets of London. Katunga, however, is not the only place in which the sun shines, where the office is made for the man, and not the man for the office; but as they have no pension list in Katunga, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... VERNON DOWSETT—"Experientia Dowsett"—manages the stage. Good as is the entire show, and especially good as is the performance of Mr. CHARLES GODFREY as an old Chelsea Pensioner recounting to several little Peterkins a touching and heart-stirring tale of the Crimean War, yet for me, the Costermonger Songs of Mr. ALBERT CHEVALIER are the great attraction. His now well-known "Coster's Serenade," and his "Knocked 'em in the Old Kent Road," are supplemented by a song and dialogue about a Coster's son, a precocious little ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... it, it will no longer be able to exist shorn of its splendor, however much it may in its origin have been adapted for use rather than for show. The wheels were heavy, cumbrous and ill put together; they were not well adapted for the costermonger's purpose, and will probably fall to pieces before long. Their fate is a type of that of their once master. That ornamental individual, shorn of his ornamental character, is useless. His raison d'etre is gone as entirely as Othello's occupation was. And it will probably ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... picturesque and outstanding figures. These they will attack or defend with fervour. But you will be lucky if you overhear any serious discussion of policy. Emerge from the nether world. Range over the whole community—from the costermonger who says 'Good Old Winston!' to the fashionable woman who says 'I do think Mr. Balfour is rather wonderful!'—and you will find the same plentiful lack of interest in the impersonal side of polities. You will find that almost every one is interested in politics ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... course, in these degenerate days, where a great deal of style and vulgar "side" is put on; where the house-servants are in livery; the dinner is served on silver plates, in empty mimicry of a ducal mansion; where all travelling sprigs of nobility are welcomed by the proprietor (who was probably a costermonger before his emigration) to whom he is glad to introduce his daughter with the scarcely-veiled recommendation that she has fifty thousand to carry in her hand to the right man, provided he has good English blue blood in his veins and none of the inferior ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... Here, although the everlasting club, to which he is born, is wielded by his driver, he often looks comfortable and sleek, and sometimes wears a red ribbon at each ear. It would not pay to bring on to the ground the scrawny, bony creature that generally tugs in the costermonger's cart. It is in the coal region or trade that you meet with him and his driver in their worst apostacy from all that is seemly in man or beast. To watch the poor creature, begrimed with coal-dust, wriggling up a long, steep hill, with a load ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... into the road to look up at the house, thereby imperilling his life amid the traffic. A costermonger taking cabbages from the Borough Market to Limehouse gave the captain a little piece of his mind in the choicest terms then current in his daily intercourse with man, and received in turn winged words of such a ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... of endurance have been passed. If she kills me I shall die a martyr in the cause of the Queen's peace. And if it is only one woman, then it was the same lady, more than half intoxicated, that I saw in the Whitechapel Road cruelly ill-treating a little costermonger. If it was not she it was certainly her sister, and I do not care ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... off the ground I was struck with the clever way in which a London costermonger will turn anything and everything to account. One of them was going about with a truck of cherries, crying out, "Sir Roger ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies |
