"Costermonger" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... door was generally encamped a man who sold nothing but Brazil nuts. Swarms of people lazily wandered past him, most of them waiting for the public-house to open. Brazil nuts on a cold black Sunday morning are not exhilarating, but the costermonger found many customers who bought his nuts, and ate them, merely because they had nothing better to do. We went two or three times to a freethinking hall, where we were entertained with demonstrations of the immorality of the ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... the vulgar costermonger to bestride his long-ear'd Arabian, and belabor his panting sides with merciless stick and iron-shod heels to impel him to the goal in the mimic race—or the sleek and polish'd courtier to lick the dust of his superiors' ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... picture to a costermonger in Madrid for a bag of peas, is represented at the Champ de Mars by several canvases, the smallest of which would bring forty thousand francs. His best works are in France. The Wedding at the Vicarage, his chef-d'oeuvre, belongs to Madame de Cassin; M. Andre owns his Serpent-Charmer; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... Vot is this here to do with Sir Eddard? I'll tell you. It has been my werry great happiness to clear out Sir Eddard, and werry well I was paid for doing it. The Tories knows what jobs is, and pays according-ly. (Here the Meeting gave the Conservative Costermonger fire.) The 'pinion I then formed of Sir Eddard has jist been werrified, for hasn't he comed forrard to oppose them rascally taxes on commercial industry and Fairlop-fair—on enterprising higgling and 'twelve in a tax-cart?' ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... cart that held a squad Of costermonger line; With one poor hack, like Pegasus, That slav'd ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... praying to him for the town. The neighborly offer of the country to console her for the loss of the town she received with alarm, hastening to bethink herself that God cared more for one miserable, selfish, wife-and-donkey-beating costermonger of unsavory Shoreditch, than for all the hills and dales of Cumberland, yea and all the ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... anything further removed from the mythological meadows could not possibly be conceived, even by the most sanguine temperament. True, there was a market garden or two, and odors redolent of decaying vegetables; but, on the whole, it was rather an unsavory region, and much frequented by the costermonger and fishwoman. ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... discussion between you and me, do you agree? But before we come to close quarters, as you say in England, I wish to know whether the argument is to be conducted on lines that befit gentlemen. On the last occasion when we differed, you used the methods of the costermonger." ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... street-venders, who cry cassada-cakes, palm-oil, pepper, pieces of beef, under such names, as agedee, aballa, akalaray, and which are therefore as unintelligible as the street-cries of London. This is the costermonger type. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... understand plays yet," said Ashton; "that man depicts a certain style of life, and he must be true to it. If he enacts the part of a costermonger, he must swear and talk slang, and commit crimes, if need be, or anything suiting the character he assumes; or else the thing would be absurd, and the gentleman and costermonger would be ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... our wards we harboured, for a while, a costermonger. This coster, an entertaining and plucky creature who had to have a leg amputated, received no callers on visiting day: his own relatives were dead and he and his wife had separated. "Couldn't 'it it orf," he explained, ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... the way of honest work, at teaching their children, at protecting them with a perfect courage and chivalry against oppression and wrong. He instinctively appealed in fact to their higher nature, and such an appeal seldom remains unanswered. In the roughest costermonger there is a vein of real nobleness, often even of poetry, in which lies the whole chance of his rising to a better life. I remember, as an instance of the way in which such a vein can be touched, the visit of a lady, well known for her work in the poorer districts of London, to ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... water is the only beverage at dinner, with punch afterward; and estimating the number of teetotallers, among the English at three hundred, there are six hundred among the Irish, who constitute, it may be remembered, only one-third of the whole costermonger class, and those Irish teetotallers, having taken the pledge under the sanction of their priests, look upon it as a religious observance and keep it rigidly. The number of Irish teetotallers has been considerably increased since Mr. Mayhew made his returns, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... they are carried to the apartment where they are hung up, while oak logs are burnt beneath. In twelve hours they are sufficiently smoked, and then you have the real Yarmouth bloater. I am glad I have seen the process, as I have a horrible suspicion that the costermonger manufactures many a Yarmouth bloater in some filthy Whitechapel slum, the odour of which by no means tends to improve the flavour ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... transacts, he hooks in his principal for a great deal more employment in the justice line than the honest squire had ever bargained for; so that no apple-wife within the circuit of ten miles can settle her account with a costermonger without an audience of the reluctant Justice and his alert clerk, Mr. Joseph Jobson. But the most ridiculous scenes occur when affairs come before him, like our business of to-day, having any colouring of ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... not ashamed to admit that I have no idea how this could have been done. Shakespeare himself, who apologizes for trying to make a cockpit hold the vasty fields of France, might have been excused for not attempting to decant The Universal Deluge into a receptacle scarcely bigger than a costermonger's barrow. Of the three remaining cars, Sin was beyond comparison the finest both in conception and execution. Perhaps he would have looked the part more obviously if he had had more of a once-aboard-the-lugger expression ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... are you on the crossing, James? Is your father Hill?" and is informed "No. He's drove mother down to Hascot." More personal was such work as "The Stags, a Drama of To-day," in which a retired thimblerigger and an unfortunate costermonger, under a magnificent alias, take advantage of the railway mania to make their application for shares—for which they could not pay, of course, if things went wrong—in accordance with the game of "heads I win, tails I vanish," ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... to be something melo-dramatic, foreign, Bohemian, and poetic. It was the mere blind, dull, dead germ of an effort—not even life—only the ciliary movement of an antecedent embryo—and yet it had got beyond Anglo-Saxondom. No costermonger, or common cad, or true Englishman, ever yet had that indefinable touch of the opera-supernumerary in the streets. ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... while I was at home, a costermonger came to the door with walnuts. The girl answered the bell, and presently I saw the coster and his cart go past the dining-room window. I don't know why it was, or how it was, but a suspicion came over me. I stepped sharply to the ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... duke had not heard so many good stories as you have, certain it is that sovereign got so wrapt up in it, that, when a number of courtiers came galloping up and interrupted Martin, he swore like a costermonger, and threatened, only half in jest, to cut off the next head that should come between him and a good story; and when Martin ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade |
