"Cockney" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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 ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... afterwards upon all kinds of Romany matters. I remember how warm he waxed upon his pet aversion, “Smith of Coalville,” as he called him, who, he said, for the purposes of a professional philanthropist, had done infinite mischief to the gipsies by confounding them with all the wandering cockney raff from the slums of London. On my repeating to him what, among other things, the Romany chi before mentioned said to me during the ascent of Snowdon from Capel Curig, that “to make kairengroes (house-dwellers) ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... 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 flung himself into ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... personal bearing of a Chesterton in or out of the House of Lords. It is strictly sui generis. It has neither the quiet, unassuming dignity of the Derbys, the Shaftesburys, or the Warwicks, nor the vulgar vanity of the untravelled Cockney. It simply defies accurate delineation. Dickens has attempted to paint the portrait of such a character in "Bleak House"; but Sir Leicester Dedlock, even in the hands of this great artist, is not a success,—merely because, in the case of the Baronet, selfishness and self-importance ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... ship-chandler who pitched upon Boston for a home, and lived with his family in the rooms above his shop; and my grandmother Smith dropped her "aitches" with the cheerful ease of one to the manner born, bless her stout old Cockney heart! I can remember her hearing me my spelling-lesson of a night, her spectacles far down on her old button of a nose, her white curls bobbing from under ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... of. Our stalwart ancestors did admirably well without umbrellas; they wore good cloaks or coats, and broad beavers to keep the rain out of their necks, faring not a jot the worse for it. Umbrellas are only fit for men-milliners, Cockney travellers, and women. The nature of a hat, we flatter ourselves, is something independent of cotton and whalebone; and instead of the umbrella claiming precedence over the hat, the hat, we take it, should be above the umbrella. An Englishman's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... his life, I do not think he expected in the least that his performance would enable me to boast of his Tom Broadbent as a genuine stage classic. Mrs Patrick Campbell was famous before I wrote for her, but not for playing illiterate cockney flower-maidens. And in the case which is provoking me to all these impertinences, I am quite sure that Miss Gertrude Kingston, who first made her reputation as an impersonator of the most delightfully feather-headed and inconsequent ingenues, thought ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... this: His Serene Highness was venturing a small fish to catch a large one. As a good and provident ruler, anxious for the prosperity and well-being of his subjects, he was making a bid for the valuable patronage of the British Cockney. He was acting the part of land-lord of a gratuitous "free-and-easy," in the hope of making Florence an attractive place of residence to that large class of nomad English to whom gratuitous court-balls once a week appeared to be a near approach ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... as ill-dressed as the rest of them, but he did not speak in the Cockney dialect. If he was of the riffraff of the streets, as his companions were, ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... absurd pair looked the most ridiculous it would be hard to say: a great-grandson of George the Second in the Highland garb of "Bonnie Prince Charlie," was perhaps as absurd an anachronism as a fat cockney alderman in the same fancy costume. Our friends the caricaturists were fully alive to these puerilities. An anonymous caricature of the day celebrates the ludicrous event in a satire entitled, Equipt for a Northern Visit, which represents the fat king ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... around, stepped the little drill sergeant, a finished example of precise, graceful movement. He was explaining in clean cut, and evidently memorised speech the details of the movements he wished executed, but through his more formal and memorised vocabulary his native cockney would occasionally erupt, adding vastly to the pungency and ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... quickly exhausted, the Quarterly extinguished its sale by "proving that Mr. Hazlitt's knowledge of Shakespeare and the English language is on a par with the purity of his morals and the depth of his understanding."[26] The cry was soon taken up by the Blackwood's people in a series on the Cockney School of Prose. Lockhart invented the expression "pimpled Hazlitt." It so happened that Hazlitt's complexion was unusually clear, but the epithet clung to him with a cruel tenacity. When an ill-natured reviewer could find nothing else to say, he ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... 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
... [I am afraid this great lubber the world will prove a cockney] That is, affectation and ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... with little employment for any one but Tommy and the captain, for Topelius's natives discharged cargo and brought ballast; the time passed like a pleasant dream; the adventurers sat up half the night debating and praising their good fortune, or strayed by day in the narrow isle, gaping like Cockney tourists; and on the first of the new year, the Currency Lass weighed anchor for the second time and set sail for 'Frisco, attended by the same fine weather and good luck. She crossed the doldrums with but small delay; on a wind and in ballast of broken coral, she outdid ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... 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, is—What ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... or fifth visit to this beautiful mountain lake of Lano-to (i.e., the Deep Lake), and the oftener I came the more its beauty grew upon me. Alas! its sweet solitude is now disturbed by the cheap Cockney and Yankee tourist globe-trotter who come there in the American excursion steamers. In the olden days only natives frequented the spot—very rarely was a white man seen. To reach it from Apia takes about five hours on foot, but there is now a regular road on which one can travel ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... step-mother out of her self-reproach, 'I do not think that if I had been my good aunt's own child, she would have been more likely to find out that anything was amiss. It was the fashion to be strong and healthy in that house, and I was never really ill—but I came as a little stunted, dwining cockney, and so I was considered ever after—never quite comfortable, often forgetting myself in enjoyment, paying for it afterwards, but quite used to it. We all thought it was "only Fanny," and part of my London breeding. Yes, we thought so in good faith, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of her descriptions is that of her meeting with Sir Walter Scott and with Wordsworth at a breakfast in Mount Street, and of Sir Walter's delightful talk and animated stories. One can imagine him laughing and describing a Cockney's terrors in the Highlands, when the whole hunt goes galloping down the crags, as is their North-country fashion. 'The gifted man,' says Mrs. Opie, with her old-fashioned adjectives, 'condescended to ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... 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 much ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... to him, noticing against her will the more than suspicion of cockney accent and the thick drawl with which the words ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... every time 'e lets vly, and it'll be 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 the curious bell-like cry, and again the Corinthians and the fighting-men ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... face, long nose, and wide mouth, with large restless eyes. There was a grin on his countenance which seemed permanent, and had it not been for his bronzed complexion, I should have declared him to be a cockney, and nothing else. He was, however, no such thing, but what is called a rock lizard, that is, a person born at Gibraltar of English parents. Upon hearing my question, which was in Spanish, he grinned ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... all legislators, just (it has been well said) as "cockney equestrians are the most fearless of all riders." But the confidence with which they propose their theories is less surprising than the facility with which their propositions have been entertained, and their extravagant pretensions ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... fine manners, which only, from our point of view, make matters worse. It is, with variations I admit, much the same all through: R. L. Stevenson felt it and confessed it about the Ebb-Tide, and Huish, the cockney hero and villain; but the sense of healthy disgust, even at the vile Huish, is not emphasised in the book as it would have demanded to be for the stage—the audience would not have stood it, and the more mixed and varied, the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... JOE would cock a nose At "Cockney JOHN," as certain foes Called JOSEPH's rival. Words like those Part Shepherd swains. Sad when crook-wielders meet as foes ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 20, 1892 • Various
... 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 who plays tennis every year at the foot of ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... Charles II. seem at once more human and more detestable than the passions and poisons of the Renaissance, much in the same way that a monkey appears inevitably more human and more detestable than a tiger. Compared with the Renaissance, there is something Cockney about the Restoration. Not only was it too indolent for great morality, it was too indolent even for great art. It lacked that seriousness which is needed even for the pursuit of pleasure, that discipline which is essential even to a game of lawn tennis. It would ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... 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 another thousand pounds to your stock, and then I shall be in less ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 frippery,—olla podrida cropping ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... coat, corduroy breeches, and boots with 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
... who had spoken tearlessly, as from a dead, tearless heart, of the worst essentials of her tragedy, was caught by a sob at something in this memory of the ship at the Nore—why, Heaven knows!—and her voice broke over it. To Aunt M'riar, cockney to the core, a ship was only a convention, necessary for character, in an offing with an orange-chrome sunset claiming your attention rather noisily in the background. There were pavement-artists in those days as now. This ship the old lady told of was a new experience for her—this ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Stockleigh?" he asked. The soft sing-song intonation common to all Devon voices fell very pleasantly on ears accustomed to the Cockney twang ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... gov'nor," responded Millwaters promptly, dropping into colloquial Cockney speech. He turned to Perkwite and winked. "Well, an' wot abaht this 'ere bit o' business as I've come rahnd abaht, Mister?" he went on, nudging his companion, in ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... equal love for books and for having her own way; but she was delicate, and Mrs. Howard wisely judged that a few years in a country village would improve her health and broaden her view of life beyond that of cockney provincialism. For, though Mrs. Howard had more refinement than strength of mind, and passed generally for a sweet and inoffensive little woman, she did not lack a certain true perception of values, due doubtless ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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. ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... the Play-writer. A little too much always about Miss Austen, whom yet I think quite capital in a Circle I have found quite unendurable to walk in. Thackeray's first Number was famous, I thought: his own little Roundabout Paper so pleasant: but the Second Number, I say, lets the Cockney in already: about Hogarth: Lewes is vulgar: and I don't think one can care much for Thackeray's Novel. He is always talking so of himself, too. I have been very glad to find I could take to a Novel again, in Trollope's Barchester Towers, etc.: not perfect, like Miss Austen: but ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... exhausted in making the steamer fast,—in sending off her Majesty's mails, of which the cockney speaks with a tone of reverence altogether disgusting to us free-minded Yankees,—and in entertaining the custom-house inspectors, who paid a long and tedious visit to the saloon and our luggage. Then we were suffered to land, and enter the noisy, solid streets of Liverpool, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... this day that Lord Albemarle got off his famous pun. On the Queen saying to him, "I wonder if my good people of London are as glad to see me as I am to see them?" he replied by pointing to the letters "V. R." "Your Majesty can see their loyal cockney ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... sorts of people in the world, the Cockney has the queerest notions about vegetable nature. Show him the first letter of the alphabet, for instance, and he ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... Half 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 ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... no respecters of spirit. Jimmy had successfully fought poverty and ill-health; he had risen from a newspaper-boy's existence to the dizzy heights of a milkman's cart. His pale face with its prominent eyes and rich, chestnut forelock bore an expression of indomitable Cockney confidence in the ultimate decency of things. He had always been kind to his mother. "More like a girl than a boy," she said, "in the way he cared for his home and looked after me." And now Jimmy was dead: the message had come that he would not return. "And why is he ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... in New England, than it is anywhere else in this country, at this very moment. One leading New York paper, edited by New England men, during the last controversy about the indemnity to be paid by France, actually styled the Due de Broglie "his grace," like a Grub Street cockney,—a mode of address that would astonish that respectable statesman, quite as much as it must have amused every man of the world who saw it. I have been much puzzled to account for this peculiarity—unquestionably one that ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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 ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... Somebody's Experiences in an Enemy Country. Well, and so Stella Clackmannan and I, in the hostel we run for poor dears who've lost their situations abroad and have no friends to go to on coming back here, found among our guests a bright little Cockney who's been what she calls an up-and-down girl in the Royal Palace at Bashbang, the capital of Rowdydaria. My dearest, the things that girl has climbed over and crawled under, and the weather she's come through, in escaping from the Rowdydarians ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... seven years old in the year in which his father was able to see the new St. Wilfred's an edifice complete except for consecration—it seemed to him that his education had centered in the prevention of his acquiring a Cockney accent. This was his mother's dread and for this reason he was not allowed to play more than Christian equality demanded with the boys of Lima Street. Had his mother had her way, he would never have been ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... and soiled, an exile and an alien, Somehow you touched the Cockney nymphs with awe; You lit the cold clay statue, like Pygmalion, To blood-red raptures; you were sib to SHAW; Others might hale the town in cushioned chariots To see them dance or daub, to hear them strum; You also had your moments: jigging Harriets Joyed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... then," she said, shortly. "You don't look like a Cockney. I guess you're a gentleman, aren't you—run away from home ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... go and bring the paper which had been pinned to my bib. But the old man said it was no matter,—"only we would have called him Marquis," said he, "if his name was not provided for him. We must not leave him here," he said; "he shall grow up a farmer's lad, and not a little cockney." And so, instead of going the grand round of infirmaries, kitchens, bakeries, and dormitories with the rest, the good old soul went back into the managers' room, and wrote at the moment a letter to John Myers, who took care of his wild land in St. Lawrence County for ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish; but charity never faileth. And when all our "dialects" on both sides of the water shall vanish, and we shall speak no more Yorkshire or Cape Cod, or London cockney or "Pike" or "Cracker" vowel flatness, nor write them any more, but all use the noble simplicity of the ideal English, and not indulge in such odd-sounding phrases as this of our critic that "the combatants ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... cockney in a rural village was stared at as much as if he had intruded into a kraal of Hottentots. On the other hand, when the lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished from the resident population as a Turk or a Lascar. His dress, his gait, his ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... get up, dear!" 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
... North; the cultivators and hewers of the western forests are wholly dissimilar from the enterprising traders of the eastern coast; republicanism is not always democracy, and democracy is not always locofocoism; a gentleman is not always a loafer, although certainly a loafer is never a gentleman. A cockney, who never went beyond Margate, or a sea-sick trip to Boulogne, that paradise of prodigals, always fancies that all Americans are Yankees, all clock-makers, all spitters, all below his level. He never sees or converses with American ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... of the person." In some cases, as with the Nubian thong-apron, this demand of modesty requires not a little practice of the muscles; and we all know the difference in a Scotch kilt worn by a Highlander and a cockney sportsman. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... dropping the final r where it was preceded by a broad vowel. If she said idear, she compounded for it by saying waw. She said lor for law, and dror for draw, but then she said cah for car. Some of our Americans are as free with the final r as the cockney is ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... movements of value are escapes from professionalism; and they begin by shocking the public because they seem to make the art too easy. Dickens was horrified by an early work of Millais; Ruskin was enraged by a nocturne of Whistler. He said it was cockney impudence because it lacked the professionalism he expected. Artists and critics alike are always binding burdens on the arts; and they are always angry with the artist who cuts the burden off his back. They think he is merely shirking ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... find the 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... 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 in the rank breath ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... the southern fringe your Hudson's Bay Trader will prove to be a distinct disappointment. In fact, one of the historic old posts is now kept by a pert little cockney Englishman, cringing or impudent as the main chance seems to advise. When you have penetrated further into the wilderness, however, where the hardships of winter and summer travel, the loneliness of winter posts, the necessity of dealing directly with savage men and savage nature, develops ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... 'ARRIES at large on a Bank Holiday Could hardly indulge in more blundering pranks. Stroke "catches a crab" in the clumsiest style, (And they called him a fine finished oarsman, this chap!) At his "Catherine-wheeler" a Cockney might smile, As he tumbles so helplessly back in Bow's lap. And Bow!—well, he's snapped off the blade of his scull, And poor Cox's steering-gear's all "in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 5, 1890 • 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 ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... She marked the inevitable false rhyme of Cockney and Yankee beginners, morn and dawn, and tossed the verses on the pile of those she had finished. She was looking over some of the last of them in a rather listless way,—for the poor thing was getting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... considered her a goddess. She poured the thousands into Coutts' Bank, and with the arrival of each fresh thousand he was more firmly convinced that she was a goddess. To say he looked up to her would be too mild. As the Cockney tourist in Chamounix peers at the summit of Mont Blanc, he peered at Mrs. Greyne. And when, finally, she bought the lease of the mansion in Belgrave Square, he ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... entreaties the cab-driver hurried on. With all the skilled experience of a thorough cockney charioteer he tried to conquer time and space by his rare knowledge of short cuts and fine acquaintance with unknown thoroughfares. He seemed to avoid every street which was the customary passage of mankind. The houses, the population, the costume, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... person (she honeyed a Cockney twang) speedily came back to report that Miss. French had left about half-an-hour ago, and was not ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... outer skin of the ship grew bright with the red neon glare. Another ship, from China, dropped slowly to its stage near by, and the unloaders swarmed about the pneumatic tubes to receive the mail. The teleradio was shouting news of a failure of the Manchurian wheat crop. Nat's chief officer, a short cockney named ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... to whom books were roads open to adventures; he saw skies in books, and books in skies, and in every orderly section of social life magic possibilities of vagrancy. But he was also a Cockney, a lover of limit, civic tradition, the uniform of all ritual. He liked exceptions, because, in every other instance, he would approve of the rule. He broke bounds with exquisite decorum. There was in all his excesses something of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... down the back. I never discovered the origin of his family; it was a matter of which he did not speak, perhaps because he was vague about it himself; but if an earl of Norman blood had married a handsome Cockney kitchenmaid of native ability, I can quite imagine that Samuel Savage might have been a child of the union. For the rest he was a good man and a faithful one, for whom I ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 Kew comes first. ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... 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 fire and demoniac incoherences. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... eyes and nervously-twitching fingers found himself pushed before the desk. He seemed at first embarrassed and half dazed. Brooks waited without any sign of impatience. When at last he spoke, it was without the slightest trace of any Cockney accent. ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the cockney historian, "that the conversion of Clovis was as much a matter of policy as of faith." But the cockney historian had better limit his remarks on the characters and faiths of men to those of the curates who have recently ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... was beginning 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 sky. In their breadth, their ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to you! Woe for ever! Darkness is coming, and I and Death await you with cold arms." Every timber complained with whining iteration, and the boom of the full, falling seas tolled as a bell tolls that beats out the last minutes of a mortal's life. The Cockney poet sings— ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... him!—that overbearing bully—Yah! Tut, tut, tut, tut, tut!—it put me out dreadfully, and I am speaking in haste, for Ripsy is a fine, trustworthy man—my best non-com—to complain to me about you making a chum, a regular companion, of that confounded, low-bred cockney rascal, Pegg. Hang him! I'll have his peg sharpened and make him spin in a more upright manner before I have done with him! Ripsy told me that the fellow was on fatigue-work—takes advantage of the freedom of his position to sneak off to your quarters to hatch some prank or mischief or another; ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... late at 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 ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... 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, putti, filial, filiation, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... 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
... 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 which ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... a voice in vigorous cockney, "this 'ere tide ain't in the 'abit o' waitin'. If we go to-night, we go this minute, sir!" It was the skipper, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... 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 ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... 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
... without intermission to the melody of the nightingale, which he believed was to be heard from every bramble, and which he did not fail to mention as a very important part of the happiness of a country life." In London, this insincere cockney adopts Savage's view. Thales, who is generally supposed to represent Savage (and this coincidence seems to confirm the opinion), is to retire "from the dungeons of the Strand," and to end a healthy life in pruning walks and ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... was not imitated as the most meaningless sort of modern vulgarity is imitated. King Richard's great red hat embroidered with beasts and birds has not overshadowed the earth so much as the billycock, which no one has yet thought of embroidering with any such natural and universal imagery. The cockney tourist is not only more likely to set out with the intention of knocking them, but he has actually knocked them; and Orientals are imitating the tweeds of the tourist more than they imitated the stripes of the squire. It is a curious and perhaps melancholy truth that the world ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... in that poor little Cockney's finger than there is in your whole body!" Cecilia whispered, apparently addressing the unoffending cloth—which, having begun life as a dingy green and black, did not seem greatly the worse for its new decoration. "Hateful old thing!" A smile suddenly twitched the corners of her mouth. ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... 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
... manuscript for the paper of the following day. 'Blackwood's' was then in its glory, its pages redolent of 'mountain dew' in every sense; the humor of the Shepherd, the elegantly brutal onslaughts upon Whigs and Cockney poets by ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Rogers and Manson are discovered laying the table for breakfast, the lad being at the upper end of the table, facing the audience, Manson, with his back to the audience, being at the lower end. Rogers is an ordinary little cockney boy in buttons; Manson is dressed in his native Eastern costume. His face is not seen until the ...
— The Servant in the House • Charles Rann Kennedy
... summer carriages, and in some decree to the rudeness of the soil, in the Upper Province especially, boats are in much more general use; and excursions on the water, are as common to that class "whose only toil is pleasure." as cockney trips to Richmond, or to any other of the thousand and one places of resort, which have sprung into existence, within twenty miles of the Metropolis of England. Not confined, however, to picking daisies for their doxies, as these said ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... faith was born to fade: Now the Rite is masquerade. Now a cockney paladin Winds a penny horn of tin. Where in reverence heads were bowed Surges now a careless crowd; "Muddied oafs" and "flanneled fools" Jostle "Yanks" with camping stools;— Gone the things that meaning gave "With the ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... drunkards, but I told them I had brought a book with me which they could look at and read out loud to each other while I was away—at which they nodded gravely —and I went off with my beautiful cockney. ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... coming out of the chancery of the British Legation, a little cockney messenger in uniform came snorting into the court on a motor-cycle. As he got off he began describing his experiences, and wound up his story of triumphant progress—"And when I got to the Boulevards I ran down a blighter on a bicycle and the ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... began to feel queer, and look down, down, down. Nothing could he see but darkness visible. He questioned his guide as to how far they were from the bottom, cautiously and nervously. "Oh," said the Swede, "about a mile." "A mile!" replied the Cockney: "shall we ever get there?"—"I don't know," said the guide. "Why, does any accident ever happen?"—"Yes, often."—"How long ago was the last accident, and what was it?"—"Last week, one of our women went down, and when ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... Cap'n Pigg a nasty twinge. He had always prided himself on his seaman-like ways, and to proceed thus, down the great river, like a mountebank, or a Cockney out on a Bank Holiday, hurt his feelings ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... culture of the 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, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... 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
... folly! He has heard that word of some great man, and now applies it to a fool. Vent my folly! I am afraid this great lubber, the world, will prove a cockney. I prithee now, ungird thy strangeness, and tell me what I shall vent to my lady; shall I vent to ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... his audience. Nor 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 vote of ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... COCKNEY, a word of uncertain derivation, but meaning one born and bred in London, and knowing little or nothing beyond it, and betraying his limits by his ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... perfect life you seem to live here! I have always felt rather contemptuously towards the poets before, with their wishes, "Mine be a cot beside a hill," and that sort of thing: but now I am afraid that the truth is, I have been nothing better than a cockney. Just now I feel as if twenty years' hard study of law would be amply rewarded by one year of such an exquisite serene life as this—such skies!' looking up—'such crimson and amber foliage, so perfectly motionless ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... on the steam heat in November. On rainy days you are exercised in a glass-roofed tanbark ring, and hour after hour you are handled over deep straw to improve your action. You breathe outdoor air only in high-fenced grass paddocks around which you are driven in surcingle rig by a Cockney groom imported with the pigskin saddles and British condition powders. From the day your name is written in the stud-book until you leave, you have balanced feed, all-wool blankets, fly-nettings, and coddling that never ceases. Yet this ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... of the London cockney's prefix of the letter h to innocent words beginning with a vowel having its prototype in the speech of the vulgar Roman, as may be seen in the verses ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 'Twixt those squares and squares of granite plating the impervious pile As his scale-mail's warty iron cuirasses a crocodile. Reels that castle thunder-smitten, storm-dismantled? From without Scrambling up by crack and crevice, every cockney prates about Towers—the heap he kicks now! turrets—just the measure of his cane! Will that do? Observe moreover—(same similitude again)— Such a castle seldom crumbles by sheer stress of cannonade: 'Tis when ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... by birth, 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
... Having made up his mind to that act, he is not ashamed to name it; neither, on the other hand, does he rant about it, and talk about Philistine prejudices and higher laws and brides in the sight of God, after the manner of the cockney decadent. He was breaking a social law, but he was not declaring a crusade against social laws. We all feel, whatever may be our opinions on the matter, that the great danger of this kind of social opportunism, this pitting of a private necessity against a public custom, ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... 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
... "Perhaps the cockney thinks we're admirals, with our pockets lined with gold. Perhaps he and some of his pals intend to rob us, later in the evening," proposed Dan, ...
— Dave Darrin's Second Year at Annapolis - Or, Two Midshipmen as Naval Academy "Youngsters" • H. Irving Hancock
... capture thee there have fallen thousands of the German invaders; in thy defence there have died Belgians and French and English, Canadians and Indians and Algerians. Three miles away, on Hill 60, are the bodies of hundreds of men who have fought for thee—the Cockney buried close to the Scotchman, the Prussian lying within a yard of the Prussian who fell there a year before, and along the Cutting are French bayonets and rifles, and an occasional unfinished letter from some long-dead poilu ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... 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 ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... both girls, "friends" were quite as much pain as pleasure. No girl could do without them; but they were pretty certain to cause heart-aches, to make a girl wish at some time or other that she had never been born. A London factory-girl would have expressed it in the Cockney way: "Blokes are no good—but ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a decided Cockney accent]. Oh, my dear, talk about an afternoon! We 'ave 'ad a treat ...
— Fanny and the Servant Problem • Jerome K. Jerome
... 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 Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... sound of e is broadened out by the natural Irishman,—not, to my ear, without a certain euphony;—but no one in Ireland says or hears the reverse. The Irishman who in London might talk of his "neetive" race, would be mincing his words to please the ear of the cockney. ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... 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. ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... 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 of affairs cultivate these minor ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... praise the two volumes of 1842, which he did gladly. 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 ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... 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
... who would volunteer for the hazardous work of cleaning up the wharves and warehouses and sprinkling them with petroleum. Six prisoners volunteered, but they might better have served out their terms, for the next day four of them were dead. Though the stout Cockney, harbormaster, known as "Pinkie" because of his rosy complexion, was pallid with fear, the other European residents of Sandakan seemed utterly indifferent to the danger to which they were exposed. But life in a land ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... curving stream. This is the city of Brunai, the capital of the Yang di Pertuan, the Sultan of Brunai, aetat one hundred or more, and now in his dotage: the abode of some 15,000 Malays, whose language is as different from the Singapore Malay as Cornish is from Cockney English, and the coign of vantage from which a set of effete and corrupt Pangerans extended oppressive rule over the coasts of North-West Borneo, from Sampanmangiu Point to the Sarawak River in days gone by, ere British enterprise stepped in, swept the Sulu and Illanun pirates ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... will testify, is short of, and 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 of Europe. The inevitable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... description or other, was kept—waiters, chambermaids, grooms, postillions, shoe-blacks, cooks, scullions, and what not, for there was a barber and hair-dresser, who had been at Paris, and talked French with a cockney accent, the French sounding all the better, as no accent is so melodious as the cockney. Jacks creaked in the kitchens turning round spits, on which large joints of meat piped and smoked before the great big fires. There was running up and down stairs, and along galleries, slamming ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... journeyman bricklayer, or his clerk; a 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
... bought a couple of bottles of whisky from the hawker when this portentous announcement was made, and little "Cockney Smith" the youngest man of the party, who was just about to drink off the first grog he had tasted since his semi-annual spree at Boorala, ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... and was 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 ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... took to 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 ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... a ring round us when we stopped to interview a railway official. The beautiful, bronze-haired, ox-eyed young woman in her disreputable attire—I have never seen a broken black feather waggle more shamelessly—was a sight indeed to strike wonderment into the cockney mind. And perhaps her association with myself added to the incongruity. I am long and lean and unlovely, I know; but it is my consolation that I look irreproachably respectable. Of the two I was infinitely the more disturbed by the public attention. "Calm and unembarrassed ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... activity. London is the nucleus of England; not only the seat of government, but the focus of intellect, of art, of culture, of all that makes life worth living; and please do not put me down as a cockney, Miss Lambert, if I confess that I love these crowded streets. I am a lawyer, you know, and ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... coaching whip in his hand, the old horse bus-driver of London in his habit as he had lived. The old fellow stood there and just talked to the audience of a fine sporting class of men that petrol has driven from the streets, without exaggerated humor or pathos. Desmond, himself a born Cockney, at once fell under the actor's spell and found all memories of the front slipping away from him as the old London street characters succeeded one another on the stage. Then the orchestra blared out, the curtain descended, and the house broke into a great ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... authors have too long been in the habit of trying to raise a laugh about every thing, and we have too long been inundated with a species of drama in which the chief wit is anachronism and the chief wisdom a Cockney familiarity with the disreputable works of the Metropolis. We trust that the debut of the Prodigal Son at Vauxhall and the Casinos is that crisis of a disease which precedes a return to health, and that henceforth we shall hear less about Haroun ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... understood, but every one expected as their right (for a preacher was nothing then who could not prove himself "a good Latiner"); and graced, moreover, by a somewhat pedantic and lengthy refutation from Scripture of Dan Horace's cockney horror of the sea— ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... he said, plucking impatiently at her demure sleeve, and even in my semi-consciousness I smiled at the sound of the words from his cockney lips. ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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
... truth, my dear Mrs. M—-, my art (she was English, and cockney, and dreadfully mangled the letter h whenever it stumbled into a speech) ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie |
