"Cockney" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 mode of treatment it adopts. ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... American Review," should be, upon all occasions, merely "quiet," must necessarily, upon many occasions, be simply silly, or stupid; and has no more right to be considered "easy," or "natural," than a Cockney exquisite, or than the sleeping Beauty ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... creep, And human footsteps never tread, There is a store of treasure hid. If it be so, I have no doubt, Some lucky wight will find it out. Yet so or not is nought to me, For I shall ne'er go there to see." The man did slyly twice or thrice The Cockney thenk for his advice; Then heame agean withoot delay He cherfully did tak his way. An' set aboot the wark, an' sped, Fun' ivvery thing as t' man had said; Were iver efter seen to flourish T' fanest gentleman ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... not return at once to the scenes about Quade's place, but went to the station, three quarters of a mile farther up the track. Here, in a casual way, he learned from the little pink-faced Cockney Englishman who watched the office at night that Stevens had been correct in his information. Quade had gone to Tete Jaune. Although it was eleven o'clock, Aldous proceeded in the direction of the engineers' camp, still another quarter of a mile deeper in ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... 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 duty, on the old established ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... temple of the winds, opinion; and it replaces the Gemoniae by ridicule. Its majo is called "faraud," its Transteverin is the man of the faubourgs, its hammal is the market-porter, its lazzarone is the pegre, its cockney is the native of Ghent. Everything that exists elsewhere exists at Paris. The fishwoman of Dumarsais can retort on the herb-seller of Euripides, the discobols Vejanus lives again in the Forioso, the tight-rope dancer. Therapontigonus Miles could walk ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... 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 ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... 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 in war; whereas the yokel, or the sergeant—major ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... the German thinks of both, and all think of the Yankee. In a word, his own tribe contains everything that is excellent, with the Pawnee, the Osage and Pottawattomie, as Paris contains all that is perfect in the eyes of the bourgeois, London in those of the cockney, and this virtuous republic in those of its own enlightened citizens; while the hostile communities are remorselessly given up to the tender solicitude of those beings which lead nations, as well as individuals, into the sinks of perdition. Thus Nick, liberalized as his mind had comparatively ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... Government House, he was greeted by cries of "Avenge Majuba!" and "Bravo, General!" and by the amount of emotion expended and the universal expression of relief evidenced, it was plain that the Cape colonists, like the cockney Londoner, were prepared "to bet their bottom dollar" on the combination of Sir Redvers Buller and ...
— 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
... But he had shown kindness to her in his domineering way. He was not quite so illiterate as his accent and his general air of uncouthness seemed to imply. In his speech, the broad vowels of the Lancashire dialect were grafted on to the clipped staccato of a Cockney. He would scoff at anyone who told him that knives and forks had precise uses, or that table-napkins were not meant to be tucked under the chin. In England, especially in the provinces, some men ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... insufficient for 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 country ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... 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 ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... was by himself, became clumsy and common at 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 coach and six horses would carry you to Japan." "If your ramble," says Swift, in another letter, "was on horseback, I am glad of it, on account of your health; but I know your arts of patching up a journey between stage-coaches and friends" coaches—for you are as arrant a Cockney as any hosier in Cheapside. I have often had it in my head to put it into yours, that you ought to have some great work in scheme, which may take up seven years to finish, besides two or three under-ones that may add ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that anxious night. He gave himself away then. I don't think he remembered much of what he had said next morning. It seemed sad to me his self-revelation. He said he did not know what in the world to do, he felt so ill and anxious. He was a Cockney born, and he had loved his South London work. He really wanted to tackle the job in front of him here. But the romance was there behind him in that English city the unique sense of being in the right place the ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... a back door, and in a little waiting-room I was introduced to some of the speakers. They were a scratch lot as seen in that dingy place. The chairman was a shop-steward in one of the Societies, a fierce little rat of a man, who spoke with a cockney accent and addressed me as 'Comrade'. But one of them roused my liveliest interest. I heard the name of Gresson, and turned to find a fellow of about thirty-five, rather sprucely dressed, with a flower in his buttonhole. 'Mr Brand,' he said, in a rich American voice ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... feed me not on mythic lore, But Science and the modern Fact, Teach me Electric Fires to store, The difference 'twixt "Bill" and "Act." Why should a Cockney care a "cuss" ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... dragoman).—What on earth have you been saying about London? The Pasha will be taking me for a mere cockney. Have not I told you always to say that I am from a branch of the family of Mudcombe Park, and that I am to be a magistrate for the county of Bedfordshire, only I’ve not qualified, and that I should have been a deputy-lieutenant if it had not been for the extraordinary ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... lady, unsatisfied with this genuine specimen of Cockney philosophy, is vowing that if she once gets safe on shore, she will never again set foot in a half-penny boat, we are already at Waterloo Bridge. Duck goes the funnel, and we dart under the noble arch, and catch a passing view of Somerset House. The handsome ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... half a minute to digest the fact that I could understand his cockney. Lucie became almost hysterical with laughter ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... 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 in a very indifferent manner, but were rather ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... to see 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
... nautical in sentiment. The chorus contained some observations like "Hilley-hiley-Hilley-ho," and it also gave us the information that gentleman named Jack would shortly come home from the sea. The thing was a silly Cockney travesty of a sailor's song, but we were all pleased with it, and it led the way nicely to the girl's ditty, which stated that somebody was going sailing, sailing, over the bounding main (sailors always mention the ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... offspring, issue; infant, babe, baby, tot, bairn, brat; bastard (illegitimate); orphan; foundling, waif; cockney (spoilt child); minor. Associated Words: pediatrics, prolicide, infanticide, puberty, philoprogenitive, philoprogenitiveness, misopedia, filicide, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... 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 ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... authoritatively to bundles of filmy paper. Papers lay to left and to right of him, there were great envelopes so gorged with papers that they spilt papers on to the table. Above him hung a photograph of a woman's head. The need of sitting absolutely still before a Cockney photographer had given her lips a queer little pucker, and her eyes for the same reason looked as though she thought the whole situation ridiculous. Nevertheless it was the head of an individual and interesting ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... 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 woman ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... taking on a 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
... to have existed among the uneducated Romans that irregularity in the use of h which marks the language of the English cockney to-day. Nigidius Figulus, the grammarian, said: "Your speech becomes boorish if you aspirate wrongly." Catullus in one of his epigrams ridicules the cockneyism of a person who said chommoda for commoda, and hinsidiae for insidiae. [3] In later Latin, the varying spelling shows ...
— Latin Pronunciation - A Short Exposition of the Roman Method • Harry Thurston Peck
... autumn sunshine. Nathanael proved himself almost as good a horseman as Duke Dugdale: a great pleasure to Agatha, for of all things women do like a man to be manly. Nay, once, in the descent of a hill so steep, that a Cockney equestrian would have been frightened out of his seven senses, Nathanael's prudent daring stood out in such bold relief that Agatha was perforce reminded of the day when he snatched little Jemmie from the bear, the first day ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the child of nine years and a half old, that was forced to undergo this terrible ordeal. We will suppose that, by the aid of the dancing-master and the drill-sergeant, I have been cured of my vulgar gait, and that my cockney accent has disappeared. Children of the age above-mentioned soon assimilate their tone and conversation with those around them. I was tall for my years, with a very light and active frame, and a countenance, the complexion of which was of the ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... they had gained below. Let them remember that the great Sutherlandshire sportsman and sporting writer, the late Mr. St. John, was once a fine gentleman about town; that Christopher North was an Edinburgh Professor, a man of city learning and city cultivation; and, as one more plea for our cockney chalk-streams of the south, that Mr. Scrope (who passed many pleasant years respected and beloved by Kennet side, with Purdy at his heels) enjoyed, they say, the killing of a Littlecote trout as heartily as he did ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... about I cannot imagine; all I know is that that evening, in the meadows near C—, a wretched Cockney, in a battered chimney-pot hat, and carrying an umbrella, was wantonly run to earth by a handful of natives, and that an hour later the same unhappy person was clapped in the village lock-up for the night as a suspicious character! It had all been tending to this. Fate had marked ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... station or two beyond, suggests sport of a less lethal character, being an ancient meeting-place for the queen's stag-hounds. John Leach may have collected here some of his studies of Cockney equestrianism. The sportsmen so dear to his pencil furnished him wealth of opportunities on their annual concourse at the cart's tail. The unloading of the animal, his gathering himself up for a leisurely canter across country, the various styles and degrees ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... down. Von Plaanden 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 haul Galpy ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... 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 on him and his household in their ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... 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 ...
— Facts for the Kind-Hearted of England! - As to the Wretchedness of the Irish Peasantry, and the Means for their Regeneration • Jasper W. Rogers
... O'Shaughnessy made him at home and fixed such a tempting supper for him that I am sure he was glad of the chance to stay. He was very decidedly English, and powerfully proud of it. He asked Mrs. O'Shaughnessy if she was Irish and she said, "No, ye haythen, it's Chinese Oi am. Can't yez tell it be me Cockney accint?" Mr. Boutwell looked very much surprised. I don't know which was the funnier, the way he looked or what ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... 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
... 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 see them ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... 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 ...
— 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
... take great interest in geographical facts; they are proud of them, lord and cockney, from the merchant prince to the ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... fault? Sensation it is thine! The garrulous paragraph, the graphic line, Poster and portrait, telegram and tale, Make shopboy eager and domestics pale. Over the morbid details workmen pore, Toil's favourite pabulum and chosen lore, Penny-a-liners pile the horrors up, On which the cockney gobe-mouche loves to sup, And paragraph and picture feed the clown With the foul garbage that has gorged the town. "Vice is a monster of such hideous mien As to be hated needs but to be seen." So sang the waspish satirist long ago. Now Vice is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... liberty! now I cry liberty! Catch me again, when you can, Prodigality! Never was there poor soul so cruelly handled. I was at the first, like a cockney[398] dandled, Strok'd on the head, kiss'd and well cherished, And so thought surely I should have continued: But now, how my case is altered suddenly! You would not believe, unless you saw it apparently. I'faith, since ye saw me, I have been ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... "You drop that Cockney accent and learn Berkshire, and I'll give you half a sovereign when you can talk it," I promised him. "Don't, for instance, say 'ain't,'" I explained to him. "Say 'bain't.' Don't say 'The young lydy, she came rahnd to our plice;' say 'The missy, 'er coomed down; 'er coomed, and 'er ses to the maister, ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... All around me were cockney Englishmen, murdering the Queen's English, and Scotchmen who were doing worse. I had not yet become the possessor of a dictionary, and my chief instructors in language, and particularly pronunciation and ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... should give 'im 'arshish, sir," said the cockney. "It's the Injin 'emp 'e needs. But 'e ain't smelt beer since we left Millsborough. Somethin's just appeared to 'im, and ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... corrupted the English of the South, why is it that he has not also corrupted the language of the West Indies—British and French? French negroes speak like French persons of white blood, and British West Indian negroes often speak the cockney dialect, without a trace of "nigger." Moreover, it is pointed out that in southern countries, the world over, there is a tendency to soften the harsh sounds of language, to elide, and drop out consonants. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... existed outside the imagination of an American. I make no complaint of the fact that in a chequered past she had married both Carter's man-servant and the antiquated poet; but I do complain that her Cockney accent was imperfectly consistent both with her rustic origin an apple-cheeked lass, we were told, from somewhere in Kent) and her situation as maid ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... against the moon, which she said looked like an imbecile. On the other hand, she had a sort of hungry appetite for all the fruitful things like fields and gardens and anything connected with production; about which she was quite practical. She practised gardening; in that curious cockney culture she would have been quite ready to practise farming; and on the same perverse principle, she actually practised a religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived. Any number of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... 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 mean to make ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... occupations which the city could not give: the buying and selling of plants, grain, and kine, the meddling with new grafted trees, the mending of spaliers, the straightening of fences, the going round (with the self-importance and impatience of a cockney) to see what flowers had opened, what fruit had ripened over-night; to walk through the oliveyards, among the vines; to pry into stable, pig-stye, and roosting-place, taking up handfuls of drying grain, breaking twigs ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... 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 ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... I remember a Cockney boy of fifteen telling me how at Southend he had gone for fun to see wounded Germans brought ashore. But the fun died out in his heart at the reality, and he ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... blunt?" 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
... 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
... and, but for the 'gentleman' and that slight but ineradicable twang that clings like Nessus' shirt to the cockney, all effort and all education notwithstanding (it will even last three generations, and is audible, perhaps, now and then in the House of Lords), her speech was correct and even dainty in its ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... 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 ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... man who worked on the same floor with Henry turned out to drink at his expense, and left off work for a good hour. With some exceptions they were a rough lot, and showed little friendliness or good-humor over it. One even threw out a hint that no cockney forges were wanted in Hillsborough. But another took him up, and said, "Maybe not; but you are not much of a man to drink his liquor and ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... theatres much more amusing, not from the excellence of the dramatic performances, but from their sheer and gross absurdity, which, without actual experience, is almost too monstrous for belief. The fact is, that a new Cockney school has arisen, ten times more twaddling and impotent than the ancient academy of that name. The old professors, for whom I always had a sneaking kindness, affected a sort of solitary grandeur, deported themselves with the conscious swagger of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... 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
... 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
... 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
... to the strains of 'The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.' How I longed to join the wild riders! But though I am a brave man, I confess that to ride a merry-go-round in front of a laughter-loving Cockney public is more than I can dare. I had to content myself with watching the faces of the riders. I noticed particularly one bright-eyed little girl, whose whole passionate young soul seemed to be on fire with ecstasy, and for whom it was not difficult to prophesy trouble when time ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... with their vasty houses and noise-ridden streets, can call us rustics if they choose; but for all that, Fairfield is a better place to live in than London. Doctor says that when he goes to London his mind is bruised with the weight of the houses, and he was a cockney born. He had to live there himself when he was a little chap, but he knows better now. You gentlemen may laugh—perhaps some of you come from London-way, but it seems to me that a witness like that is worth ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... not from pole to pole-the man lives here Whose razor's only equall'd by his beer; And where, in either sense, the cockney-put May, if he pleases, get confounded cut. On the sign of an Alehouse kept ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... making way than drawing off. Gad, sir, for my own poor share, I did but go into the house of a poor widow lady, who maintained a charge of daughters, and whom I had known of old, to get my horse fed, a morsel of meat, and so forth, when these cockney-pikes of the artillery ground, as you very well call them, rallied, and came in with their armed heads, as boldly as so many Cotswold rams. I sprang down stairs, got to my horse,—but, egad, I fancy all my troop had widows and orphan maidens to comfort ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... night, and he was in a despondent mood after one of his recurring disappointments—this time a graceful slender shape which he had earlier in the evening pursued in a flock of home-going shop-girls until she turned and revealed a pert Cockney face which bore no resemblance to Sisily's. Several hours later he paid another of his visits to Euston Square, which he believed to be the starting-point of Sisily's own wanderings. He felt closer to her in that locality because of that. From Euston ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... its native heath and the City clerk on the loose, however, were not prone to such vestments as young Mr. Karslake affected. It wasn't that he overdressed; even the ribald would have hesitated to libel him with the name of a "nut"—which is Cockney for what the United States knows as a "fancy (or swell) dresser"; it was simply that he was always irreproachably turned out, whatever the form of dress he thought appropriate to the time of day; and that his wardrobe was so complete and varied that he seldom appeared twice in the ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... crashing through your boots at every step; 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, dying of thirst in the desert, ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... highest state of peaceful, smiling cultivation. The fields by the roadside are enclosed by hedges as in England, the harvest was in part down, and an English country gentleman who was of our party pronounced the crops to be as fine as any he had ever seen. Of this matter a Cockney cannot judge accurately, but any man can see with what extraordinary neatness and care all these little plots of ground are tilled, and admire the richness and brilliancy of the vegetation. Outside of the moat of Antwerp, and at every village by which we passed, it ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... away to the south-west is Dean Prior, and the living that Herrick held when he poured out his grumbles and complaints about 'dull Devonshire.' Herrick was a true Cockney, and the earliest part of his life was spent in a house in Cheapside. When he grew up, he had the good luck to come into the brilliant and witty company that gathered round Ben Jonson, so it must be allowed that he had an excuse for sometimes thinking that life in an obscure hamlet, ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... 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 ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... 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 ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... return to Paris when you ennuied yourself so enormement?" asked a yellow-haired English girl who had painted countless vaporous and ravishing Eurydices and filmy Echoes from broad-waisted, pug-nosed Cockney models, and who always declared that she would recognize a "professional" even among the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... is"—expostulated 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)
... sphere. Mainly, however, the thin sweetness of the air, which I am certain contained a much larger proportion of oxygen than our terrestrial atmosphere. In spite of the strange quality of all about us, I felt as adventurous and experimental as a cockney would do placed for the first time among mountains and I do not think it occurred to either of us, face to face though we were with the unknown, to ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... perceptions and the value of 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
... strange of mouth; At Over they fling oaths at one, And worse than oaths at Trumpington, And Ditton girls are mean and dirty, And there's none in Harston under thirty, And folks in Shelford and those parts, Have twisted lips and twisted hearts, And Barton men make cockney rhymes, And Coton's full of nameless crimes, And things are done you'd not believe At Madingley on Christmas Eve. Strong men have ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... dead thing! Never! It 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 ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... the difficulties of a foreign language, you realized that this Cockney sergeant was a man. For one thing he had a sense of humour; he had kept it in the midst of terror and death—kept it standing all night in trenches full of icy-cold water, with icy-cold water pouring down his collar. Also the sergeant had a sense of honour—there were things ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... servant of Mr. Pickwick. The impersonation of the shrewdness, quaint humor, and best qualities of cockney low life.—C. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... name, and nature, the country of the Franks, or free persons; and the first source of European frankness, or franchise. The Latin for franchise is libertas. But the modern or Cockney-English word liberty,—Mr. John Stuart Mill's,—is not the equivalent of libertas; and the modern or Cockney-French word liberte,- -M. Victor Hugo's,—is ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... 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
... of the Whitechapel man flashed fire for an instant—a fire that certainly is not common to Cockney eyes—and he made a sudden grasp at ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... from a six months' job of driving a British ambulance on the war front in Belgium brings this back straight from the trenches: "One cold morning a sign was pushed up above the German trench facing ours, only about fifty yards away, which bore in large letters the words: 'Got mit Uns!' One of our cockney lads, more of a patriot than a linguist, looked at this for a moment and then lampblacked a big sign of his own, which he raised on a stick. It read: 'We ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... tops of a chalky white. Yet, withal, not the air and walk of a genuine born and bred sporting man, even of the vulgar order. Something about him which reveals the pretender. A would-be hawk with a pigeon's liver,—a would-be sportsman with a Cockney's nurture. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with doors and windows boarded; several of the churches made over into barracks, or riding-schools; the market closed; the State House filled with lounging officers; and the streets thronged, even at this early hour, by a varied uniformed soldiery, speaking Cockney English, the jargon of the counties, Scottish Gaelic, or guttural German, as they elbowed their passage, the many scarlet jackets interspersed with the blue of artillery and cavalry, the Hessian red and yellow, the green of the rifle-corps, or the kilts of the ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... can the various public and even private buildings, which are daily springing up around us, like so many mushrooms, be contemplated without considerable emotions of mirthfulness. The new style of ecclesiastical architecture, entitled the Cockney-Gothic, affords a good illustration of this remark; but the comic Temple of the Fine Arts, in Trafalgar Square, is what Lord Bacon would have called a "glaring instance" of its correctness. The occurrences of the day bear all of them the stamp of facetiousness. ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... started the subject. "Ham," I said to him, "is jambon. Go ahead." W. went ahead, but "high" in the sense he wanted did not seem to be in the dictionary. I had a try when W. gave up and began with an explanation of the cockney's difficulty with the letter "h." Madame smiled uncomprehendingly. W., who had studied the dictionary while I talked, made a fresh start at "je suis." "Je suis—I am. Jambon—ham, c'est a dire ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... orderly, a 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 ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... A Cockney may well boast of his great city, its wealth, its vast population, and its magnificent buildings; but with regard to the Thames, of which he is equally proud,—he that has seen the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the McKenzie, and many others, compared to ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... the crew was crowded close around a little red-faced cockney. He was the modern "chanty man." With sweat pouring down his cheeks and the muscles of his neck drawn taut, he was jerking out verse after verse about women. He sang to an old "chanty" tune, one that I remembered well. But he was not singing out under the stars, he was screaming ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... good deal damaged in the world's estimation, stepped down; his erstwhile well-curled mustache of brick-dust hue seemed to droop as he slunk out of the box; he appeared subdued, almost frightened,—quite unlike the jaunty little cockney that had stepped so blithely forth to give ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... 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 clouds ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he 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
... matter of the quaint features of the speech of the English countryside, or the wonders of the Cockney dialect, the unlearned foreigner hardly dare venture. It is sufficient for us to wonder why a railroad should be a railway. When it becomes a "rilewie" we are inclined, in our speculation, "to pass," as we say over ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... 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 men from the house in Bolton-street all following Williamson ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... yestiddy? Ye wanted th' ladies' sparklers, or I'm a doughhead." The police are the same all over the world; the original idea sticks to them, and truth in voice or presence is but sign of deeper cunning and villainy. "Anyhow, ye can't run around Washington like ye do in England, me cockney. Ye can't drive more'n a hundred miles an hour on ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... 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 that he DID repent, that much of his banter was amusing, and that, above all, ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... (LANE) is a reasonably diverting because superbly improbable account of England under the new Socialist Commonwealth, with Joseph Anymoon, a highly popular Cockney plebeian, as President. Follows an era of feminist control and a Bolshevist revolution contrived by one Cohen (with the authentic properties, "Crimson Guards" and purple morality), and finally the Restoration through the loyalist ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... Vitellius had ready-cooked food served to each of the soldiers, as is done with gladiators in training, and the common people flocked out from Rome and wandered all over the camp. Some of these visitors indulged in a cockney practical joke,[426] and stole some of the soldiers' swords, quietly cutting their belts while their attention was diverted. Then they kept asking them, 'Have you got your sword on?' The troops were not used to being laughed at, and refused ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... 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 in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... lull in the conversation and then a small, wiry, spiteful looking Cockney spoke. He had reddish hair and big round spectacles ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... Cooper. Snuyt uw neus, Blow your nose. Sewel, 1740; but snuyven, ofte snuffen, To Snuffe out the Snot or Filth out of ones Nose. Hexham, 1660. Alearned friend, who in his bachelor days investigated some of the curiosities of London Life, informs me that the modern Cockney term is sling. In the dress-circle of the Bower Saloon, Stangate, admission 3d., he saw stuck up, four years ago, the notice, "Gentlemen are requested not to sling," and being philologically disposed, he asked the attendant the ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... dweller, indweller[obs3]; addressee; occupier, occupant; householder, lodger, inmate, tenant, incumbent, sojourner, locum tenens, commorant[obs3]; settler, squatter, backwoodsman, colonist; islander; denizen, citizen; burgher, oppidan[obs3], cockney, cit, townsman, burgess; villager; cottager, cottier[obs3], cotter; compatriot; backsettler[obs3], boarder; hotel keeper, innkeeper; habitant; paying guest; planter. native, indigene, aborigines, autochthones[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... vital point is 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," says Professor Ostwald of Berlin University, "makes ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... there and make some inquiries about him. I saluted and left. The first place I went to in the wagon lines was the cookhouse and as I got there I thought I noticed the swish of someone quickly disappearing round the corner and the cockney-cook there informed me that Scotty had spent the previous evening with them and had only ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... absolutely flat and unsatisfactory in fact! There was on this occasion a vast display of dress and jewelry, and among the babel of languages spoken the most prominent was the beautiful London dialect sometimes irreverently called Cockney. I lost my cavalier at one time, and while I waited for him to find me I retired to a corner and challenged a mask to a game of chess. He proved to be a Russian who spoke neither French nor Italian. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... home in a sort of dimness, and then at his very doorstep, recovering as it were, his ancestral consciousness. I think it was the sight of his wife and the tones of her voice that suddenly announced to him with the sound of a trumpet that he had nothing to do with this woman with the Cockney accent, or the pastor who was coming to supper, or the red brick villa, or Peckham or the City of London. Though the old place on the banks of the Usk had been sold fifty years before, still, he was Caradoc of the Garth. I forget how I ended the story: ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... fancies rare; Flash'd like Aurora's glare; Quick jotted down with care; Some the reverse of fair; Some that we well could spare; Some that were made to bear Blunders unnumbered. Plunging in metaphor, Not a bit better for— Pardon the Cockney rhyme!— Similies plunder'd. Praising Tobacco smoke, Heeding not grammar's yoke, Prosody's rules they broke. Many a rhyming moke, Sense from rhyme sundered: Many wrote well, but not— Not the Six Hundred. Honour Tobacco! roll'd, Cut, press'd, however sold. Alpha ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... year 1854—or it 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 ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... hands up to his head and walked about the yard for a few moments. Then he turned abruptly and stood toweringly over the scared survivor—a tough, wizened little Cockney of five foot six. ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... of which two are supported horizontally on the branches of the trees, and a third planted perpendicularly in the ground. These cimeaux are intended as a sort of treacherous invitation to the birds to come and rest themselves. So regularly as Sunday morning arrives, the Marseillais Cockney installs himself in his pit, arranges a loophole through which he can see what passes outside, and waits with all imaginable patience. The question that will naturally be asked, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... 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, ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... 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 ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... 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 |
