"Cockney" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ship with ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... 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 ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... of the 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 and the fat alderman in kilts, the point ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... by the Romans B.C. 271, the first of several experiments which resulted in these cascades, which have been more sung and oftener painted than any other in the world. The beauty of Terni is so hackneyed that enthusiasm over it becomes cockney, yet the beauty of hackneyed things is as eternal as the verity of truisms, and no more loses its charm than the other its point. But one must not talk about it. The foaming torrent rages along between its rocky walls until ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... beginning with an aspirated h, when the accented syllable of the word is the second. For myself, so long as I continue to aspirate the h's in such words as heroic, harangue, and historical, I shall continue to use a before them; and when I adopt the Cockney mode of pronouncing such words, then I shall use an before them. To my ear it is just as euphonious to say, "I will crop off from the top of his young twigs a tender one, and will plant it upon an high mountain and eminent," as it is to say an harangue, an heroic, or an historical. ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... people wandered round the booths, and Swithin found himself obliged to give the girls his arms. 'Like a little Cockney clerk!' he thought. His indignation passed unnoticed; they talked, they laughed, each sight and sound in all the hurly-burly seemed to go straight into their hearts. He eyed them ironically—their eager voices, and little coos of sympathy seemed to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was a good-looking, rather coarsely built young fellow, with one of those awful Cockney accents which literally make one jump. But he looked painfully nervous, stammered at every word spoken, and repeatedly gave answers entirely ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... 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 ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... 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
... two fellers is hextry policemen, I suppose," cried a newly arrived cockney, with great staring eyes, watching our movements as eagerly as though we were wild animals ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... the owl speaks good Cockney Hinglish," whispered one of the butlers, who had been born ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... coat. He had a long 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 more than ever, and inquired, in a strange ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... coxcomb, the paltry fool, the degraded woman,—are pictured for your honorable pleasure in every page, with clumsy caricature, struggling to render its dullness tolerable by insisting on defect,—if perchance a penny or two more may be coined out of the Cockney ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... in Canada," said Wright, "but originally he was a Cockney, from the London slums. And I believe I am the only person who ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... enough for any one who has a taste for natural beauties," replied Rose. "I haven't; I never had. There is nothing I hate so much as Nature! I'm a born cockney. I'd rather live in one room over Jordan and Marsh's, and see the world wag past, than be the owner of the most romantic villa that ever was built, I don't care where it ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... the saturnalia of 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 ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... complain that they can do 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
... in the country all day,' were his first words; and he went on to talk of trivial things—the doings of a Cockney excursion party that ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... had sent him, picking his way among the orange boxes, the moving farms, and the wig-makers of Covent Garden, he had come upon a sculptor's shop, oddly crowded in among Cockney carters and decaying vegetables. Faces of Greece and Rome gazed at him suddenly from a broad window, and for a few moments he forsook the motley beauty of modern London for ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... Sanford knew that he had struck the man over the face with his whip, cutting the phrase. The mare plunged and the whole crowd congested about the bellowing cockney as Bill held Cameron back, and huge Jansen planted ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... not alone for their antiquity, (so remote that one looks into it dizzily and doubtfully, as a depth into which it is not wholly safe to peer,) but also for the perfection in which they stand and have stood amid the desolation of unnumbered ages. A Cockney clergyman travelling through Eastern Syria, with his Ezekiel in his hand, arrives at nightfall before the gates of a town which was a flourishing metropolis in the days of Moses, and takes up his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • 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 ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... morning, the cockney as usual, taking the lead. One man followed him, but kept losing ground purposely, merely keeping the leader in sight; the others did the same. Before the last man had lost sight of the camp, he could see Spiller in the distance walking towards it. He then ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... pierheads, and the workmen, humoured by the dockman's jest, give us a hoarse cheer as they scurry across the still moving bridge. In time-honoured fashion our Cockney humorist calls for, 'Three cheers f'r ol' Pier-'ead, boys,' and such of the 'boys' as are able chant a feeble echo to his shout. The tugs straighten us up in the river, and we breast the flood cautiously, for ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... came forth and stared upon the emigrants. The silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their appearance, would have touched any thinking creature, but my fellow-passengers danced and jested round them with a truly Cockney baseness. I was ashamed for the thing we call civilisation. We should carry upon our consciences so much, at least, of our forefathers' misconduct as we ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a cockney place as the majority of men who have not visited it imagine. It really is larger than the Welsh Harp at Hendon, and the scenery, though not like that of Ben Cruachan or Ben Mohr, excels the landscape of Middlesex. ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... off-hand, the second and only waiter as nearly as possible mutinous. 'All his blooming companions,' he explained (though not precisely in these words), had departed to spend Christmas in the bosom of their families. He spoke cockney English, and, in reply to a question (for the colonel tried hard to draw him into conversation and dissipate his gloom), confessed that he came ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... abroad with Jane, who, having lengthened her skirts and put up her hair, was now a young woman looking older than her years. She too had developed. Her lank figure had rounded into pretty curves. Her sharp little Cockney face had filled out. She had a pleasant smile and a capable brow, and, correcting a tendency to fluffiness of hair of which she disapproved, and dressing herself neatly, made herself by no means unattractive. Constant association with Paul had fired ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... thought, "could make this possible," when, looking up, he caught the face of a young man at a further table, full of enjoyment, ordering "spargetty" and half a bottle of "grayves," with a cockney twang, and an unutterable air of ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... the Florentine: ye monarchs, hearken To your instructor. Juan now was borne, Just as the day began to wane and darken, O'er the high hill, which looks with pride or scorn Toward the great city.—Ye who have a spark in Your veins of Cockney spirit, smile or mourn According as you take things well or ill;— Bold Britons, we are now on ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... 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
... Jonkers found himself described in full in the novel as "Drevis Noordhof," and playing a leading part in the story. Can you imagine the simple sailor's surprise and delight? Pleased beyond measure, in his soft Dutch accent liberally flavoured with cockney he told the bookseller how Mr. McFee had befriended him, had urged him to go on studying navigation so that he might become an officer; and that though they had not met for several years he still receives letters from his friend, full of good advice about saving his ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... sport, they both deemed the most exciting, caused them to upbraid me, till half-past two, with such epithets as, "an old woman," "a shocking cockney," "a fellow only fit to wear white kid gloves," "a Regent Street swell," "a land lubber," "a milk sop," and a multitude of other curious idioms, that rather made me merry than clashed with ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... Mediterranean), and the whole army discharged their 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 ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... 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 ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... curious old fellow. He was born in London, "within sound of Bow bells," as he told me; but though a Cockney by birth, he could hardly be called a native of anywhere but the world at large. He had sailed in all seas, and seemed to have tried his hand at most trades. He had at one time been a sort of man-of-all-work in a boys' school, and I think it was partly from this, and partly out of opposition ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... been changing ever since they were written. Environment, physical and mental, has altered; the language has developed; the plain, ordinary talk of Shakespeare's time now seems to us quaint and odd; every-day allusions have become cryptic. It all "ain't up to date," to quote the Cockney's complaint about it. Probably no one to-day can under any circumstances get the same reaction to a play of Shakespeare as that of his original audience, and probably ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... 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 gave me the hint. ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... heart of things—to live close to the centre of 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
... of fact, oak leaves are singularly tenacious, and the autumnal oak will show a thousand for the elm's one. Hood, being a Cockney, took his seven leaves at random. But what does it matter? He was a poet, and seven leaves sufficed ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... there is no city in the world that can for a moment enter into competition with it. For himself, though in his time something of a rambler, he is not ashamed in this respect to confess to a legitimate Cockney taste; and for his part he does not know where life can flow on more pleasantly than in sight of Kensington Gardens, viewing the silver Thames winding by the bowers of Rosebank, or inhaling from its terraces the refined ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... if you would much mind going to Africa?" she wrote, in one of her frank girlish letters. "There must be something new in Africa. One would get away from the beaten ways of Cockney tourists, and one would escape the dreary monotony of a table d'hote. There is Egypt for us to do; and you, who are a walking encyclopaedia, will be able to tell me all about the Pyramids, and Pompey's Pillar, and the Nile. If we got tired of ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... 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 ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... attracted by a bird-fancier's shop. I like dealers in out-of-the-way things,—traders in bigotry and virtue are too common,—and so I went in. The gem of the collection was a terrier,—a perfect beauty, uglier than philanthropy itself, and hairier, as a Cockney would say, than the 'ole British hairystocracy. "A'n't he a stunner?" said my disrespectable friend, the master of the shop. "Ah, you should see him worry a rat! He does it like a puffic Christian!" Since then, the world has been divided for me into Christians and perfect ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... his work well; 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
... this chastened English prose, we have men of genius who 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 ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... its way, as prolific of contrasts as any part of the United States. There is certainly no more cultivated centre in the country, and yet the letter r is as badly maltreated by the Boston scholar as by the veriest cockney. To the ear of Boston centre has precisely the same sound as the name of the heroine of Wagner's "Flying Dutchman," and its most cultivated graduates speak of Herbert Spencah's Datar of Ethics. The critical programmes of the Symphony Concerts ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... 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 by ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 of olives, to see how things were doing; and to have ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... 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 meaning of ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... game!' said the Cockney. 'I knowed I wasn't no good then, but I guv 'em compot from the lef' flank when we opened out. No!' he said, bringing down his hand with a thump on the bedstead, 'a bay'nit ain't no good to a little man—might as well 'ave a bloomin' ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... his face to be Scottish; nor could his accent undeceive me. For as there is a lingua franca of many tongues on the moles and in the feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there is a free or common accent among English-speaking men who follow the sea. They catch a twang in a New England Port; from a cockney skipper, even a Scotsman sometimes learns to drop an h; a word of a dialect is picked up from another band in the forecastle; until often the result is undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man's place of birth. So it was with ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pleasant to buy one's Ozone, like one's coal, And store it up an-nu-al-lee! And not fly for it to some dull cockney hol Just because it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, Sept. 27, 1890 • Various
... made an opportunity to speak with him, after service. It needed no pressing to extract his story, and he told it with entire simplicity. He was a Cockney, and by trade had been a baker in Bermondsey. "A wearing trade," he said. "The most of us die before forty. You'd be surprised." But he had started with a sound constitution, and somehow persuaded himself, in spite of warnings, that he was immune. At thirty-two he had married. "A deal later than ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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 run for ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... 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 knew ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... of an eager speculator who found himself among primitive folk. But the discord of ideas puts the whole piece so completely out of tune as to produce only a harsh and jarring sensation; the rough Western man is thoroughly out of his element, and flounders heavily, like a cockney among mediaeval crusaders. This must be taken in fairness to be the result of collaboration, for in his own short stories Mr. Kipling never commits solecisms of the kind; on the contrary, he excels in the shading ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... end of his art when, like a twopenny reporter, he has made a smart little sneer at something or somebody. He writes on America as Sala wrote on Russia, in the same petty, frivolous vein, with the same cockney smartness; but fails to be funny, whereas Sala frequently succeeds. He came here to write for England, not the truth, but something which his readers expected. His object was to supply a demand, and he did it. He learned nothing, and returned ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... bringing with him a spick-and-span new fishing-rod and basket. He did not know much about fishing, but he enjoyed himself just as thoroughly as if he did; and he laughed so good-humouredly at his own Cockney blunders, as he called them, that Thomas would have been quite angry had any one else presumed to indulge a smile at Mr Budge's expense. A pattern lodger in all respects was Mr Budge—deferential towards Martha and myself, and from the first moment he beheld ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... going 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 House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... part of visitors at the Zoo. We ourselves have heard the most uncomplimentary allusions made to the appearance of the baboons and the hippopotamus, in the hearing of those unfortunate creatures, and quite regardless of their amour propre. The callous Cockney takes care to insult his helpless victims only when they are behind bars and cannot retaliate effectively. One shudders to think of the mental humiliation that is daily experienced by the warthog and the mandrill. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... the Highlands? There must be lots of traffic there in the shape of sheep, grouse, and Cockney tourists, not to mention salmon and other etceteras. Couldn't we tip them a railway somewhere ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... apparently quite uninterested in what they were doing, they again began speaking to one another, or rather one of them, a hard-bitten, shrewd-looking man, much the older of the two, began talking in what was, though Timmy was not aware of it, a Cockney dialect. ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... has a stranger history than The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman, illustrated by the pencils of Cruikshank and Thackeray. Their form is a ludicrous cockney perversion, but it retains the essence. Bateman, a captive of "this Turk," is beloved by the Turk's daughter (a staple incident of old French romance), and by her released. The lady after seven years rejoins Lord Bateman: he has just married ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... 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
... 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 Dutchmen, they'll be strung ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... 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 ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... rooms he took were above a secondhand clothing shop kept by a drunken female named Leaver; a supposed widow who lived at the back of the shop with her two children, Lizzie, a bold-eyed girl of 17, who worked at a Clerkenwell clothing factory, and Joe, a typical Cockney boy of fourteen, who sold papers in the streets during the day and was fast qualifying for a thief at night when Crewe went ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... 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
... garden—Look! You see that sparrow on the sundial, swearing at the blackbird down below? Well, he has been coming here every summer for years. He comes from London. The country sparrows round about here are always laughing at him. They say he chirps with such a Cockney accent. He is a most amusing bird—very brave but very cheeky. He loves nothing better than an argument, but he always ends it by getting rude. He is a real city bird. In London he lives around St. Paul's Cathedral. 'Cheapside,' we ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... how 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 On ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 20, 1892 • Various
... train for a day's outing and play quoits, rounders, lawn tennis, and the like; the sportsman, perhaps, preferring his gun and his dog; families, again, are picnic-mad, for your colonist can rival the Cockney any day for making his holiday in the country. It may be to 'the rocks' he goes to watch his youngsters paddling in the rolling tide, or to the toil of clambering up the 'dim mountain,' which seems to suit their hardy lungs better than ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... 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 ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... 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
... Pennsylvania to the Provinces, numberless resorts exist as pleasant, as healthy, as prolific of sport, as the famed Adironbacks, and at half the cost. But, for an all-summer canoe cruise, with more than 600 accessible lakes and ponds, the Northern Wilderness stands alone. And, as a wealthy cockney once remarked to me in Brown's Tract, "It's no place ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... artist who sank very low, but had real ability. Her constant phrase was 'I shall die o' laughin'—I know I shall!' On account of her extra-ordinary gift of repartee, and her inexhaustible fund of wit and humour, she was generally supposed to be an Irishwoman. But she was not: she was cockney to the marrow. Recluse as Rossetti was in his later years, he had at one time been very different, and could bring himself in touch with the lower orders of London in a way such as was only known to his most intimate friends. With all her impudence, and I may say insolence, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... almost exclusively to servant girls. From their lips it was that I acquired the faculty of speech. Yet I am certain that the boy who walked in Richmond Park with my father in the 'sixties spoke in his dialect, and not in that of Cockney nursemaids. Why was that? If my father ever corrected my speech it was upon very rare occasions. I remember them perfectly. They were not such corrections as would very materially affect a lad's accent or choice ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... inscription from Pompeii shows some of the peculiarities of popular pronunciation. In ortu we see the same difficulty in knowing when to sound the aspirate which the cockney Englishman has. The silence of the final -m, and the reduction of ae to e are also interesting. Presta mi sinceru (sincerum): si te amet que (quae) ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... real kindness 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 ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... to visit, to live with, to return to again and again. Yet I for one would never live within her walls if I could help it, nor herd with those barbarian, exclamatory souls who in guttural German or cockney English snort or neigh at the beauties industriously pointed out by a loud-voiced cicerone, quoting in American all the appropriate quotations, Browning before Filippo Lippi, Ruskin in S. Croce, Mrs. Browning at the door ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... Nature created these animals simply for our service, assuredly bountiful Nature left them in ignorance of the fact. And it is to the sportsman and the colt-breaker that we must apply, if we wish to know whose victims are the most willing. Not to the cockney casuist, whose knowledge of the stag is confined to his venison, and who never trusts himself on the horse till it has been "long trained, in shackles, to procession pace." If he did, he would find that the unfettered four-year-old shows precisely the same alarm and resistance ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... purple and fragrant, down by the hilly sheep-paths, lying bare in 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 ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... '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 'e ain't 'arf ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... listening to him, noticing against her will the more than suspicion of cockney accent and the thick drawl with ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... to think after this series of inexplicable events? Carefinotu speaking English like a cockney, calling him by his name, announcing the early arrival of Uncle Will, and then the sudden report of ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... I know, my restlessness will ne'er assuage: Still Fanny beats, with pinions clipped, the wires of its Cockney cage! No inch of turf to prisoned larks can represent the boundless moor; And neither Hyde nor Regent's Park suggests a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... 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 ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... baize door I could hear the continuous torrent of invective, broken at first by protest, later on by soft exclamations of surprise, and finally—oh, the relief of that moment!—by an uncontrollable explosion of laughter. The Cockney mind is keenly alive to humour, and when a racy Irishwoman gets fairly started on a favourite subject, the delicious contradictions of her denunciations are hard to beat! That laughter saved the situation, and the domestic wheels began ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... obliged first, and warbled some ghastly affair which aimed at being 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 ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... lighter work then than now. 'The old saying at London, among servants,' writes that good-natured theatrical wag, Tate Wilkinson, 'was, "I wish you were at York!" which the wronged cook has now changed for, "I wish you were at Jamaica." Scotland was then imagined by the cockney as a dreary place, distant almost as the West Indies; now'(reader, pray note the marvel) 'an agreeable party may, with the utmost ease, dine early in the week in Grosvenor Square, and without discomposure set down at table on Saturday or Sunday in the new ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... history of this part of France is the history of the monarchy, and its language is, I won't say absolutely the classic tongue, but a nearer approach to it than any local patois. The peasants deliver themselves with rather a drawl, but what they speak is good clean French that any cockney can understand, which is more than can be said sometimes for the violent jargon that emanates from the fishing ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... uniform by the head tailor, who was a cockney who had been carried off by the press-gang. It was soon found that he was of no use as a sailor, but as he was by trade a tailor he was given a rating below, and it was not long before he gave such satisfaction ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... but she had never plundered the poor. Her greatest conquest—and that when she was a woman of forty—was the monarch of this very country which now lay crushed under the Kaiser's heel. For a few months he had taken a whimsical liking to her handsome face, well-preserved figure, and amusing cockney talk. But he had employed her rather as the mistress of his menus plaisirs, as his recruiting agent. He had rewarded her handsomely. Now it was all in the dust: her beautiful Villa Beau-sejour a befouled barrack for German soldiers. She ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... 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 ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... the present state of that famous institution I know nothing, nor do I wish to utter a word of disparagement of those who were responsible for its management fifty years ago; but to me, a timid boy who, in spite of his Northumbrian burr, was turned to ridicule as a Cockney by the Fifeshire lads and lasses, it wore the aspect of a veritable place of torment. That classic instrument of discipline, the tawse, was in use at every hour of the day, girls as well as boys receiving barbarous ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... didn't much matter as you sat letting it cool on the wooden terrace that stretched out into the sea. To-day the Lido is a part of united Italy and has been made the victim of villainous improvements. A little cockney village has sprung up on its rural bosom and a third-rate boulevard leads from Santa Elisabetta to the Adriatic. There are bitumen walks and gas-lamps, lodging-houses, shops and a teatro diurno. The bathing-establishment is bigger than before, and the restaurant as well; but it ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... be a whaler; but two voyages settled that fancy. I'm told they shoot their harpoons out of a gun nowadays—poor sport that! And there's no sport like whalin'. Two thousand pounds at one end of a line and your own life at the other- -that's finer sport than these Cockney partridge-shooters ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... necessarily very little, and so he passed out of her life without having left any trace in her heart, though Mela had a heart that she would have put at the disposition of almost any young man that wanted it. Kendricks himself, Manhattan cockney as he was, with scarcely more out look into the average American nature than if he had been kept a prisoner in New York society all his days, perceived a property in her which forbade him as a man of conscience to trifle with her; something earthly good ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... with a decided Cockney accent]. Oh, my dear, talk about an afternoon! We 'ave 'ad a ...
— Fanny and the Servant Problem • Jerome K. Jerome
... from his pockets and flung them down as the men surrounded him; then he drew out a cigarette case, and, with a cockney ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... which he was evidently glad to have an opportunity of exhibiting. He first came up with a souwester on his head, the wrong end foremost, and a pair of canvas shoes on his feet,—a sort of miniature Micawber, or first-class cockney "salt," about to breast the briny. This small person's long nose, large ears, and open mouth added to the ludicrousness of his appearance. As the decks were wet and the morning cold, he found the garb somewhat unsuitable, and dived below, to come up again in strong ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... disappear, and the illusion was over. It was like a sudden shock of cold water 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 ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... His Cockney accent, too, was wiped out as if by magic. Probably he had forgotten for the instant that he had used it in Locking. At any rate, he did not use it now. But his English was perfect, in word and tone—the ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... 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 conduct ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... 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. ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... a man snapping his fingers at his Bishop. (As Henry the Eighth at the Pope,—and the modern French and English cockney at ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... the judgments we once held true In various ways that are strange and new. For instance, the other day there came To see me, the same yet not the same, A former office boy, whom once I wholly misread as a Cockney dunce, Who only cared for music-hall tunes— And who went and 'listed in the Dragoons. His khaki was much the worse for wear, Soiled and crumpled and needing repair, And he hadn't unlearned since his office days His gruff laconic turn of phrase. So I had ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... 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 increase of demand for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... sat down abruptly,—the crew likewise; not, however, before she had heeled to the scuppers, and a half-bucket of iced water had run it. Head-hunters were mere daily episodes in Grits's existence, but water... He muttered something in cockney that sounded like a prayer.... The wind was rapidly driving us toward the middle of the pond, and something cold and ticklish was seeping through the seats of our ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... said with a strong Cockney accent, as he came up out of the fog, and the flare of the match gave him a full view of her, standing there with her lips shut hard, and, the hand-bag clutched up close to her with both hands. "You wot called, was it? Wot price me ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... and unescorted save by their waiting-maids: to them the encounter of rateros, salteadores, or other varieties of Spanish banditti, might be in various respects disagreeable; but for men, who, without leaving Europe, may wish to visit other scenes than those in which every Cockney tourist has wandered, we know of few expeditions more interesting than one into the interior of Spain. Fine scenery, interesting monuments, associations historic, classic, and poetical, and—which to our thinking is still preferable—a people who, in spite of Gallo and Anglo ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... placed in small parties of four or five in a single cell. After a few days our party was swelled by five new arrivals from different parts of Germany. We were a cosmopolitan crowd, comprising every strata of society, from wealthy men down to stable lads. One boisterous spirit, a Cockney, confessed far and wide that he had once suffered imprisonment at home for horse-stealing, and he did not care a rap for anything or anybody. He was always bubbling over with exuberant merriment and was one of those who can project ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... glimpse of the sea; they will not leave one another, and they indulge their pet dislikes: this shies at a camel, that kicks at a dog. Presently Tamaddun, as the Arabs say, "urbanity," or, more literally, being "citified," asserts itself, as in the human cockney; and at last they become cleverer and more knowing than any country-bred. They climb up the ladders of stone with marvellous caution, and slip down the slopes of sand on their haunches; they round every rat-hole which would admit a hoof; and ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... 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. We got along famously, however. He said something very polite ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... about 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 great adventure ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... 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 ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... that he is "romantical." Cinderella finds her Prince, who isn't in the least the Prince of the fairy tale, but much nicer under the circumstance—and the curtain goes down on a glass slipper stuck on the toes of two tiny feet and a cockney Cinderella, quite content. ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... emigre who became a London stockbroker? Was his mother an Irish colleen and the granddaughter of Tom Moore, who wrote "Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms"? Or is Stoky just plain Lionel Stokes, the sprout of a humble cockney family? ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... and we are all cast for stock roles. Some of us have the luck to be heroes, the complacent centre of eternal plaudits, some are born for villainy and the brickbat. And while others have had to play goodness knows what—mediaeval Italian princesses, Cockney cabmen, old Greek hetairae, German cuirassiers, American presidents, burglars, South Sea Islanders—I find myself—for the first time on any stage—in the applauded role of man of letters, if with little option of throwing up the part. They have an optimistic phrase, those happy-go-lucky ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... lady or a gentleman, one discovers that his ladies and gentlemen, in the English sense, are deadly dull. It is very probable that all conventional ladies and gentlemen bored Dickens, who never ceased to be a cockney, though he became the most sublimated of that class. Doctor Johnson was a cockney, too, but, though it may seem paradoxical to say it, not so greatly impressed by class distinctions ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... in Buckinghamshire in all the ecstasy of a young cockney's first sporting days. When he was quite a child and was asked what profession he intended to embrace, he replied that he would be "a gentleman and wear leather breeches," and I think it is the very destiny he is fitted to fill. He is the perfect picture of happiness when ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... 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 not ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... he had fixed on a person to take charge of his measure in the House of Commons. This person was a member who was not connected with the government, and who neither had, nor deserved to have, the ear of the House, a noisy, purse-proud, illiterate demagogue, whose Cockney English and scraps of mispronounced Latin were the jest of the newspapers, Alderman Beckford. It may well be supposed that these strange proceedings produced a ferment through the whole political world. The city was in commotion. The East India Company invoked the faith of charters. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... operations, rose heavily to his feet, and cleared his throat. Then he turned upon the alcoholic Coaldust. I strained my ears. Surely he was not going to talk Cockney! ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... thoroughfares. They shower their attentions on the wide pavements, holding them up to observation, marking them in red, and babbling and prattling obsequiously about them, meanwhile snubbing with disregard all the lanes and bypaths. They are cockney and are interested in showing only the highroads between cities, and in consequence neglect all tributary loops and windings. In a word, they are against the jog-trot countryside and conspire with the signposts against all loitering ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... said Dick, shaking his head and laughing. "Come, I'm not such a Cockney as not to know what a b-u-o-y is. But, I say, what ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... 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 Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 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 sketched and Crime is made a show. A ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... he replied. "You must like it, to find it pleasant in November," he went on, with a tone which made Geoff glance at him in surprise. Somehow in the last few words the countryman's accent seemed to have changed a little. Geoff could almost have fancied there was a cockney twang ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth
... cosmopolitan, and managed to get the truth out of this confusion of cockney, Irish, and Yankee dialect. In fact, at the first moment, he had recognized Matthew Stacy and Harriet Long in the persons who claimed his acquaintance, and they stung his memory like a ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... of Mr. Pickwick. The impersonation of the shrewdness, quaint humor, and best qualities of cockney low life.—C. Dickens, The ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... made amends by 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 with ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... crimson. ''Ow dare you talk similar to that, Sarah?' Only she pronounced it fairly with a true cockney accent, and left out all her h's. 'I don't know w'at women are comin' to nowadays, w'at wi' one thing an' another, w'en it comes to a chit o' sixteen talkin' like that about 'er mother bein' an ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... fact, the custom seemed to be to kiss when and wherever you could conveniently. Getting drunk after any drinking, and at any time of the day, seemed to be common enough. There was a vast amount of open fields, &c., about London which engendered the "Cockney sportsman." He disappeared as the fields were built over. We have no longer the peculiar "stand-up" collars, or "gills," ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... and one double-page humorous piece, well illustrated in colours. I think the humorous verses must deal with hunting. Hunting does not lend itself to humour, for there are only two hunting jokes —the joke of the horse which came down at the brook and the joke of the Cockney who overrode hounds; but there are traditions to keep up, and the artist always loves it. So far we have not considered the artist sufficiently. Let us give him four full pages. One of pretty girls hanging up mistletoe, one of the squire and his family going to church ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... for Canobie, I was completely prostrated, and had no medicine on hand except Epsom salts. During the night we (the cook, a new-chum Cockney, and myself) heard voices down at the water-hole, which we took as from a party of travelling Chinamen. In the morning we found that, some of the blacks who were implicated in the murder had doubled back, and had taken away every article of iron they ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... 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 ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... quartermasters speak fair English, and I have engaged two good German-American mates who speak German. Reardon has shipped German-American engineers and some of his coal passers and firemen speak fair English. I've got two Native Son Chinamen in the galley and a Cockney steward. We'll ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... while 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 parents ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... London —consequently know as little news as if I had been shut up in Bungey castle. Rumours there are of great bickerings and uneasiness; but I don't believe there will be any bloodshed of places, except Legge's, which nobody seems willing to take-I mean as a sinecure. His Majesty of Cockney is returned exceedingly well, but grown a little out of humour at finding that we are not so much pleased with all the Russians and Hessians that he has hired to recover the Ohio. We are an ungrateful people! Make a great many ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... of the actor did not trouble him, provided the main thought and feeling were there. He would merely laugh at a suggestion to straighten out the legs and walk, to lengthen the drawl, or to heighten the cockney accent of a prominent member of ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... behaving in a boat like Poietes, deserved being flung overboard. "Look at the bird!" Why, every eye was already upon her; and if Poietes had had a single spark of poetry in his composition, he would have been struck mute by such a sight, instead of bawling out, open-mouthed and goggle-eyed, like a Cockney to a rocket at Vauxhall. Besides, an eagle does not, when descending on her prey, fall like a rock. There is nothing like the "vis inertiae" in her precipitation. You still see the self-willed energy of the ravenous ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... author of Rab and His Friends, thought that Dickens committed vulgarities in his diction. "A good man was Robin" is right enough; but "He was a good man, was Robin" is not so well, and we must own that it is Dickensian; but assuredly Dickens writes such phrases as it were dramatically, playing the cockney. I know of but two words that Dickens habitually misuses, and Charles Lamb misuses one of them precisely in Dickens's manner; it is not worth while to quote them. But for these his English is admirable; he chooses what is good and knows what is not. A little representative collection ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... mainly to annoy them, he resolved to watch the red flicker in the gorge until the dawn came to drive the hyaena scum home. And after a time they vanished, and he heard their voices, like a party of Cockney beanfeasters, away in the beechwoods. Then they came slinking near again. Andoo yawned and went on along the cliff, and they followed. Then he ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... lamps at long intervals on table. Men playing cards, sewing on patches—(nearly all smoking)—some writing, and the rest reading Deadwood Dick. At one end of the table a Christian Endeavourer endeavouring; at the other a cockney Jew, from the hawker's boat, trying to sell rotten clothes. In response to complaints, direct and not chosen generally for Sunday, the shearers' rep. requests both apostles to shut ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... question I read out was from George Leghorn. He had written: "If a cockney nurse wished to correct a child, what insect-home would she name?" ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... the judgment of the cockney who buttered his horse's hay, the ragged boy skinned her mice and plucked her sparrows in my absence. The consequence was her untimely end. I was met by my landlady with many a melancholy "Ah, sir!" and actually the good creature had had ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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
... Cockney voice had in it a stroking quality. It stirred something in the depths of Joanna's heart. Once again she tried to speak ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... young Londoner, somewhat of the Cockney stamp, by name Thomas Brown, a youth chiefly celebrated for his immense ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... was printed first in Jamieson's collection—1806; again in Chambers's, p. 150. The 'waly' has been by Cockney critics called Scotch for 'wail ye.' The word may come from the same etymological source as 'wail,' but it is a Scots adverb, indicative ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... guineas with the quickness of a conjurer, and, like a base-born cockney as he was, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... English person calling himself Hobbs, a baker, to whom Cousin Egbert presented me, full of delight at the idea that as compatriots we were bound to be congenial. Yet it needed only a glance and a moment's listening to the fellow's execrable cockney dialect to perceive that he was distinctly low-class, and I was immensely relieved, upon inquiry, to learn that he affiliated only with the Bohemian set. I felt a marked antagonism between us at that first meeting; the fellow eyed me with frank suspicion and displayed a taste for low chaffing ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... At such times the men would lie at full length under the trees in the soft summer twilight, smoking their pipes and drinking in the melodious utterances. An indistinct idea that this was pastoral happiness pervaded the camp. "This 'ere kind o' think," said the Cockney Simmons, meditatively reclining on his elbow, "is 'evingly." It reminded ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte |
