"Costermonger" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mouth out of sight round his broad cheeks. His ample front was decked with a blue apron, suspended from his shoulders, and confined round the convexity of his waist by an old strap which no respectable costermonger would have used as harness. The soup served was by courtesy called soupe maigre, but it was in fact soupe maigre diluted by many homoeopathic myriads, and the Brother showed much curiosity as to my opinion of its taste—a curiosity which I could not satisfy without hurting his professional ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... over the place; Schleiermacher of Jena has succeeded in making the most perfect diamonds—for sixpence apiece—as good as real—and South Africa's ancient history. In less than six weeks Kimberley, they say, will be a howling desert. Every costermonger in Whitechapel will wear genuine Koh-i-noors for buttons on his coat; every girl in Bermondsey will sport a riviere like Lady Vandrift's to her favourite music-hall. There's a slump in Golcondas. Sly, sly, I can see; but ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... trader, dealer, monger, chandler, salesman; changer; regrater^; shopkeeper, shopman^; tradesman, tradespeople, tradesfolk. retailer; chapman, hawker, huckster, higgler^; pedlar, colporteur, cadger, Autolycus^; sutler^, vivandiere^; costerman^, costermonger^; tallyman; camelot; faker; vintner. money broker, money changer, money lender; cambist^, usurer, moneyer^, banker. jobber; broker &c (agent) 758; buyer &c 795; seller &c 796; bear, bull. concern; firm &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... psychology is correct. If it is, then he has indeed made an important discovery. To use a very homely illustration: a carrot dangled from the end of a stick before a donkey's nose makes no mechanical difference in the problem of traction presented by the costermonger's barrow. If anything, it adds to the weight to be drawn. But if the sight of it cheers, heartens, and inspires the donkey, helping him to overcome those fits of lethargy so characteristic of his race, then the carrot may quite appreciably accelerate the general rate of progress. It all depends ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... who is supposed to have been born of gentle people," he said to his mother afterwards, "Aunt Marian is the most vulgar old beast I have ever beheld. She has the taste of a female costermonger." Which was entirely true, but it might be added that his own was no better and his points of view and morals wholly coincided ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the street a stream of men and women poured from every door, and went to swell the main cataract which had risen suddenly in full flood in the Strand. The donkey-barrow of a costermonger passed me, loaded with a bluejacket, a flower-girl, several soldiers, and a Staff captain whose spurred boots wagged joyously over the stern of the barrow. A motor cab followed, two Australian troopers on the roof of that, with a hospital nurse, her cap awry, sitting across the knees of ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... quite recovered their good humour when the band of theatrical buccaneers, got up by the duke in Spanish costumes, with intent to deceive his lawless tenants in the East-end, came unexpectedly face to face with the genuine buccaneers of the Isle of Dogs, clothed in real costermonger caps and second-hand pilot-jackets of the marine-storedealers' fashionable pattern. It was all only the ridiculous incongruity of our actual society represented in the very faintest shades of caricature upon the stage; but it made the incongruities more incongruous still to see them ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... or to meet in a dark alley. In England, on the other hand, with its aristocratic institutions, racing is a natural growth enough; the passion for it spreads downwards through all classes, from the Queen to the costermonger. London is like a shelled corn- cob on the Derby day, and there is not a clerk who could raise the money to hire a saddle with an old hack under it that can sit down on his office-stool the next day ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Costermonger (to extremely genteel person).—"I say, guv'ner, give us a hist with this 'ere bilin' o' greens!" (A large hamper of ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... are afraid of my falling in love with a girl you don't think good enough for me, you have taken the wrong way to keep me from thinking about her, mother. You remember the costermonger whose family quarrelled with him for marrying beneath him? If a girl be a good girl, she is good for me, whether she be the daughter of the cats'-meat-man or of a royal duke! I know that's not the way people who call themselves ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... man," said a breezy costermonger to whom he had appealed, "I think you had better take a 'ansom for the 'orse will know more about London than you seem to ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... 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
... and wrote back to one of his "pals" in prison, under an assumed name, that he had been to the Prisoners' Aid Society, and had obtained as much of his gratuity as he could, to buy a barrow and some fruit, as he meant to turn costermonger. He added, however, that he did not like fruit-selling, and returned to his old trade of "gunsmith," gunning being the slang term for thieving, or going on the cross. The real fact was, that he never intended anything else than being a "gunsmith," ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... fingers—encumbered with its lurid warmth of fungous wick, and drip of stalactitic grease—that we may see, when another man would have seen, or dreamed he saw, the flight of a divine Virgin—only the lamplight upon the hair of a costermonger's ass;—that, having to paint the good Samaritan, we may see only in distance the back of the good Samaritan, and in nearness the back of the good Samaritan's dog;—that having to paint the Annunciation to the Shepherds, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... jargon, who in these earnest days would occupy many moments of his time with that? "A Costermonger in this street," says Crabbe, "finding lately that his rope of onions, which he hoped would have brought a shilling, was to go for only sevenpence henceforth, burst forth into lamentation, execration and the most pathetic tears. Throwing up the window, I perceived ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... carrying of oats; it is not barley or bere only which we store up in our 'barns,' nor hogs' fat in our 'larders'; a monody need not be sung by a single voice; and our lucubrations are not always by candlelight; a 'costermonger' or 'costardmonger' does not of necessity sell costards or apples; there are 'palaces' which are not built on the Palatine Hill; and 'nausea' [Footnote: [From nausea through the French comes our English noise; see Bartsch and Horning, Section ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... afternoon, 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 ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain |
