"Cockney" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of lives. But we did not hear the right way about the seal I have heard something about it from Fred, and I don't wonder he was so indignant. It seems they had a tame seal at the Ha'. It had been given to Miss Garson when it was very young. Its mother had been killed by some Cockney tourists, and the Laird of Lunda took the little seal home. It was a great pet, and used to go and fish for itself in Blaesound, but would always come home when ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... that the South Seas and them islands was full of queer happenings, anyhow. Said that Eri's yarn reminded him of one that Jule Sparrow used to tell. There was a Cockney in that yarn, too, and a South Sea woman and a schooner. But in other respects ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... not many steps, when he felt himself tapped on the back, and, glancing in a horror of alarm, saw one of the two patients who had occupied with him his cage of bars—a wiry, long-faced Cockney shop-boy, who had had his ankle crushed by a rock at ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... Halsham in his bitterness cries out that "the town has overflowed the country," meaning the whole country, and that "we are cockney from sea to sea," he is being tragic at the cost of truth. Would he drag Wiltshire and all the pastoral West into his turmoil? You may go about any of the villages here, watch the daily doings of the inhabitants, and feel confident that, practically, there has been no substantial change ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... with a touch even of the taste of nuts in it, and profess with contrition that properly we have never tasted Indian Corn before. Millers of due faculty (with millstones of iron) being scarce in the Cockney region, and even cooks liable to err, the Ashburtons have on their resources undertaken the brunt of the problem one of their own Surrey or Hampshire millers is to grind the stuff, and their own cook, a Frenchman commander of a whole squadron, is to ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... (LANE) is a reasonably diverting because superbly improbable account of England under the new Socialist Commonwealth, with Joseph Anymoon, a highly popular Cockney plebeian, as President. Follows an era of feminist control and a Bolshevist revolution contrived by one Cohen (with the authentic properties, "Crimson Guards" and purple morality), and finally the Restoration through the loyalist Navy, the complacent Anymoon consoling himself with the reflection ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... 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 ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... other fireworks." The picture is now the property of Mrs. Samuel Untermyer, of New York. On the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, in 1877, Ruskin wrote in Fors Clavigera: "The ill-educated conceit of the artist nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen and heard much of cockney impudence before now, but never expected to have a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz
... Cockney watering-place has great attractions; its broad sands, its beautiful air, and its boisterous amusements, negro-melodies, merry-go-rounds, and the like; but it was a place seldom visited by Dickens, although he was so often near it. Only twice in the Life ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... modern warfare. The Church of old originated and consecrated bridges; religion, royalty, and art celebrate their advent; the opening of Waterloo Bridge is the subject of one of the best pictures of a modern English painter; and Cockney visitors to the peerless Bridge of Telford still ask the guide where the Queen stood at its inauguration. But it is when we turn from the historical and scientific to the familiar and personal that we realize the spontaneous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... Munster House as a residence, after having externally decorated it with various Cockney embattlements of brick, and collected there many curious works of art, possibly with a view of reconstruction. In the garden were two marble busts, one of which is figured on previous page. The other a female head, not ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... the procession arrived the policemen were really obliging in that way. The one nearest me was as fat as Falstaff, and a slim young Cockney in front kept addressing intimate remarks to him and calling him Robert. The young impudence himself was just as ridiculous, for he wore a fringe which was supported by hair-oil and soap, and rolled carefully down the right ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... about half a minute to digest the fact that I could understand his cockney. Lucie became almost hysterical with laughter and ran into ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... 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 ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... my friends who have visited Australia say they haven't got manners, and all have a cockney twang. When they open their mouths they ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... non-essentials, yet, perhaps, enough of variance is observed to make it noticeable and altogether piquant to the wide-awake Yankee, who, in turn, balances the Western "reckoning" by his unique "kalkilations." But neither are as absurd as the Cockney, who gets off his ridiculous nonsense, as, for example, the following: "Ho Lord, help us to take hold of the horns of the ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... our ground,' cries Mr. Snapper. 'WE don't set traps for other people's birds. We're no decoy ducks. We're no sneaking poachers. We don't shoot 'ens, like that 'ere Cockney, who's got the tail of one a-sticking out of his pocket. Only just come across the hedge, ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to come, 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
... harder than ever to locate; but it also meant that I might float right over the worst of them if I hit off a lucky place.' Davies thumped the table in disgust. 'Pah! It makes me sick to think of having to trust to an accident like that, like a lubberly cockney out for a boozy Bank Holiday sail. Well, just as I foresaw, the wall of surf appeared clean across the horizon, and curling back to shut me in, booming like thunder. When I last saw the Medusa she seemed ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... presentable a fellow as ever issued from a battery barrack, and Jeffers, Cram's English groom, mutely approved the general appearance of his prime favorite among the officers at the post, at most of whom he opened his eyes in cockney amaze, and critically noted the skill with which Mr. Waring tooled the spirited bays along the ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... settled down again on the other side of the ravine. Well, here, Peter, what do you think of the fun now?—fourteen cock pigeons and one hen, to be divided between us. This is what I call sport: none of your reed-birds and meadow-larks, such as cockney sportsmen frighten away from the fields of Jersey or Long-Island. Here they come again by scores. Now let us see how good a shot you are. Two cocks on the topmost branch of that old maple, full forty yards to the trunk. No, no! don't get any ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... our way round a curve and began to cross Westminster Bridge. The conductor, whose innate cockney bonhomie his high official position had failed to eradicate, presented himself before us ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... 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 punishment ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... foot of what, to my mind, is the most glorious of all Alpine wonders—the huge Oberland precipice, on the slopes of the Faulhorn or the Wengern Alp. Innumerable tourists have done all that tourists can do to cocknify (if that is the right derivative from cockney) the scenery; but, like the Pyramids or a Gothic cathedral, it throws off the taint of vulgarity by its imperishable majesty. Even on turf strewn with sandwich-papers and empty bottles, even in ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... 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
... profound veneration all your life long? Now, in the wayward drift of your imagination among the freaks of modern fashion, did it ever dare to present before your eyes St. Paul in strapped pantaloons, figured velvet vest, swallow-tailed coat, stove-pipe hat, and a cockney glass at his eye? Did your fancy, in its wildest fictions, ever pass such an image across the ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... soul for money, Florence remains one of the most delightful cities of Italy 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
... my 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 pr'ythee now, ungird thy strangeness, and tell me what I shall vent to my lady. Shall I vent to her that ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... he bein' Cockney an' I bein' pretty far north, did nut see it i' t' saame way. We'd getten t' brass, an' we meaned to keep it. An' soa ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... 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. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... his hands up to his head and walked about the yard for a few moments. Then he turned abruptly and stood toweringly over the scared survivor—a tough, wizened little Cockney of ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... don't know. He was much too egotistical and unobservant to give me any clear idea of the kind of place, kind of country, there is on the Other Side of Things. Wherever he was, he seems to have fallen in with a set of kindred spirits: ghosts of weak Cockney young men, who were on a footing of Christian names, and among these there was certainly a lot of talk about 'going haunting' and things like that. Yes—going haunting! They seemed to think 'haunting' a tremendous adventure, and most of them funked it all the time. And ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... see his own reflection. He made his way unfalteringly to an outfitter's shop, and from there, with a bundle under his arm, to the baths. It was a very different Alfred Burton indeed who, an hour or two later, issued forth into the streets. Gone was the Cockney young man with the sandy moustache, the cheap silk hat worn at various angles to give himself a rakish air, the flashy clothes, cheap and pretentious, the assured, not to say bumptious air so sedulously copied from the deportment of his employer. Enter a new and completely transformed Alfred ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... said he, as he was preparing to go out, soon after breakfast, on the morning after his arrival, "are scarcely the thing; and as I, like you, am a stranger in Cockney-land, I had better consult some of the firm upon the subject, before we decide upon permanent ones. In the meantime, you and Willy must mind and keep in doors when I am not with you, or I shall have one or other of you lost in this great wilderness of a city. ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... Is there any message?" The intonation was cockney; it reminded him of the rich vocal ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... It was—the Cockney! The very man to whom the Swede had tendered the runner's job, the man Newman had manhandled! He lay on his back, snoring loudly, his bloated, unlovely ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... virtue of its own uncleanness, and its leading characteristics are gloom, ugliness, prurience, preachiness, and weedy flabbiness of style. That it has not flourished in Great Britain, save among a small and discredited Cockney minority, is due to the inherent manliness and vigour of the national character. The land of Shakespere, Scott, Burns, Fielding, Dickens, and Charles Reade is protected against literary miasmas by the strength of its humour and the sunniness of ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... of Mr. Pickwick. The impersonation of the shrewdness, quaint humor, and best qualities of cockney low life.—C. Dickens, The Pickwick ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... little," thought Lancelot, with his whimsical look. "So it's missus, is it, who's taught you Cockneyese? My instinct was not so unsound, after all. I dare say you'll turn out something nobler than a Cockney drudge." He finished aloud, "I ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... stated, Keats's work was bitterly and unjustly condemned by the critics of his day. He belonged to what was derisively called the cockney school of poetry, of which Leigh Hunt was chief, and Proctor and Beddoes were fellow-workmen. Not even from Wordsworth and Byron, who were ready enough to recommend far less gifted writers, did Keats receive the slightest encouragement. Like young Lochinvar, "he rode all unarmed and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... beauty of the morning 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 waking ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... lady now came on; there were shrieks of laughter at her unnecessary and irrelevant green boots and crinoline and Cockney accent. She proposed to marry the hero, who ran away from her. There was more chorus; and the ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... misfits, out-of-works, 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 ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... little river showed no signs of doing what the rustic—or surely it should have been the cockney—was supposed to stand still and wait for. There was no great rush of headlong water, for that is not the manner of the stream in the very worst of weather; but there was the usual style of coming on, with lips and steps at the sides, and cords of running toward the middle. Quite ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... gone to yer noddle. Come here!" And Cassidy led him, wondering, to the barred corridor without and slammed the door behind them. "Not a word do you whisper of this to any man, Pat Quinlan," said he, never relaxing his grasp. "You heard what that Cockney Fitzroy was swearin' to this morning? Sure—you'd never say the word to back that whelp—an' harm ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... will not longer detain you with the inevitable suggestions of the occasion. These sentimentalities are apt to slip from under him who would embark on them, like a birch canoe under the clumsy foot of a cockney, and leave him floundering in retributive commonplace. I had a kind of hope, indeed, from what I had heard, that I should be unable to fill this voice-devouring hall. I had hoped to sit serenely here with ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... personally engaged in once or twice, without ever having the satisfaction to see a bit of broken crockery. In other spots you found donkeys for children to ride, and ponies of a very meek and patient spirit, on which the Cockney pleasure-seekers of both sexes rode races and made wonderful displays of horsemanship. By way of refreshment there was gingerbread (but, as a true patriot, I must pronounce it greatly interior to our native dainty), and ginger-beer, and probably ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for lovely Kitty), Came a Cockney bound Unto Derry city; Weary was his soul, Shivering and sad he Bumped along the ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... pride himself on his acuteness in recognising the intonation of the stranger as being that of some other—of the South, it may be, or of New England. An educated Londoner has difficulty in understanding even the London cockney. Suffolk, Cornish, or Lancashire—these are almost foreign tongues to him. The American of the South has at least no difficulty in understanding the New Englander: the New Yorker does not have to make the Californian repeat each ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... junction where an English railway company begins to get in its work and to animate the Spanish environment to unwonted enterprise, there was a varied luncheon far past our capacity. But when a Cockney voice asked over my shoulder, "Tea, sir?" I gladly closed with the proposition. "But you've put hot milk into it!" I protested. "I know it, sir. We 'ave no cold milk at Bobadilla," and instantly a baleful suspicion implanted itself which has since grown into a upas tree of poisonous conviction: ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... departed, Williamson saying:—"There now, you be off; you come when I tell you; you'll find me a regular old screw; and if you don't pay your rent the day it is due I shall law you for it, so be off." Mrs. C—- then said, "My husband is a cockney, and I will bring him with me, and we will see if we can't turn the screw the right way." The ladies had no sooner arrived at the end of Mason-street, when on turning to take a last look of their singular friend ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... I was 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 crowd ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... Lamb ought really not to abuse Scotland in the pleasant way he so often does in the sylvan shades of Enfield; for Scotland loves Charles Lamb; but he is wayward and wilful in his wisdom, and conceits that many a Cockney is a better man even than Christopher North. But what will not Christopher forgive to Genius and Goodness? Even Lamb bleating libels on his native land. Nay, he learns lessons of humanity, even from the mild malice of Elia, and ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... deserted, with doors and windows boarded; several of the churches made over into barracks, or riding-schools; the market closed; the State House filled with lounging officers; and the streets thronged, even at this early hour, by a varied uniformed soldiery, speaking Cockney English, the jargon of the counties, Scottish Gaelic, or guttural German, as they elbowed their passage, the many scarlet jackets interspersed with the blue of artillery and cavalry, the Hessian red and yellow, the green ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... 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 ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 20, 1892 • Various
... Taylor. She meant to speak to Eddie about him later. He was an entirely new type to her. His fellow servant, whose name was Trotter, on the contrary, could be seen about London any day, an ordinary, ignorant Cockney. He, at least, had the merit of seeming to know his place and how to conduct himself in the presence of his betters, and except when asking for more syrup, of which he seemed inordinately fond, ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... Fairy-like young plantations of rare specimens of the coniferous tribe had arisen at every available point of the landscape, wherever there had been barrenness before. Here and there the old timber had been thinned a little, always judiciously. No cockney freaks of fancy disfigured the scene. There were no sham ruins, no artificial waterfalls poorly supplied with water, no Chinese pagodas, or Swiss cottages, or gothic hermitages. At one point of the shrubbery ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... 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
... 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
... the war front in Belgium brings this back straight from the trenches: "One cold morning a sign was pushed up above the German trench facing ours, only about fifty yards away, which bore in large letters the words: 'Got mit Uns!' One of our cockney lads, more of a patriot than a linguist, looked at this for a moment and then lampblacked a big sign of his own, which he raised on a stick. It read: ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... Sewel, 1740; but snuyven, ofte snuffen, To Snuffe out the Snot or Filth out of ones Nose. Hexham, 1660. Alearned friend, who in his bachelor days investigated some of the curiosities of London Life, informs me that the modern Cockney term is sling. In the dress-circle of the Bower Saloon, Stangate, admission 3d., he saw stuck up, four years ago, the notice, "Gentlemen are requested not to sling," and being philologically disposed, he asked the attendant the meaning of ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... degree amusing to observe the attempt made, in addition, to disguise the fact that the delinquent I speak of (I had almost written renegade) is an Irishman. No wonder that he should attempt the disguise, for he must deeply feel his delinquency. In all cases such as this, the Cockney twang and occasional curtailment is assumed to overcome the brogue, but in vain. For the first half dozen words of each paragraph in a conversation it gets on well enough, but the conclusion ...
— Facts for the Kind-Hearted of England! - As to the Wretchedness of the Irish Peasantry, and the Means for their Regeneration • Jasper W. Rogers
... 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 ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... without nerves, who goes down badly. Something snaps in him. He has no resilience in his nervous system. He has never trained himself in nerve-control, being so stolid and self-reliant. Now, the nervous man, the cockney, for example, is always training himself in the control of his nerves, on 'buses which lurch round corners, in the traffic that bears down on him, in a thousand and one situations which demand self-control in a 'nervy' man. That helps him in war; whereas the yokel, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... me. There is no theatre, nor cafe chantant open apparently. If there were, I haven't the heart for them to-night. Hear music from a small estaminet in a back street; female voice, with fine Cockney accent, is singing "Oh, dem Golden Slippers!" Wonder ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various
... read by lexicon, even in the shire of Ayr. Men now write poetry in Scotch as boys at Eton and Harrow write Latin verses, the result in both cases being, as a rule, hideous and artificial doggrel. The little book, Wee Macgregor, written in what may be called the Scotch Cockney dialect, was a brave and amusing attempt to phonograph the talk of a Glasgow boy of the lower middle class. The unlovely speech employed by the author is, happily, quite unlike the careful and deliberate speech of the educated citizen of ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... enabling him to 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 that he DID repent, that much of his banter ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... native Highlands. He felt at home and happy enough in America; and if being "happy enough" wasn't quite the beautiful state he had pictured as a boy, it was full of interest. He had taken Dunelin Castle off its owner's hands at a high yearly rent, in order that no rich and vulgar Cockney should become the tenant, but he had never stayed there, though once, even to have the right of entrance would have seemed a fairy dream. There were no such things as fairy dreams for him since he had thoroughly grown up, because in the ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... thought I'd like to 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 know of. ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... my fourth 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 ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... Cockney (Nicholas), a rich city grocer, brother of Barnacle. Priscilla Tomboy, of the West Indies, is placed under ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... completely betrays the "Cockney" as a faulty knowledge of sporting terms. The young lady at the left has just returned from the hunting field hand-in-hand with the dashing "lead," who happens to be an eligible billionaire. Her hostess, the mother of the sub-deb ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... ready-cooked food served to each of the soldiers, as is done with gladiators in training, and the common people flocked out from Rome and wandered all over the camp. Some of these visitors indulged in a cockney practical joke,[426] and stole some of the soldiers' swords, quietly cutting their belts while their attention was diverted. Then they kept asking them, 'Have you got your sword on?' The troops were ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... and with fine ways and 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 less would it have stood it—not at all; and his relief of style ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... 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, ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... Sybil's 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, the manners, the language through which they ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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 Brent, came up ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... meanness of all kinds he has a burning contempt; and on Abelard he pours out the vials of his wrath. He has a quick eye for all humbugs and a scorching scorn for them; but there is no attempt at being funny in the manner of the cockney comedians when he stands in the awful presence of the Sphinx. He is not taken in by the glamor of Palestine; he does not lose his head there; he keeps his feet; but he knows that he is standing on holy ground; and there is never a hint of ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... the child wailed his way through a song of some eight eight-line verses in the usual whine of a young Cockney, and, after compliments, left him to read Dick the foreign telegrams. Ten minutes later Alf returned to his ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... extended baton. Down to the footlights she minced, delicately as Agag to the downfall of his hopes, thrust out an impudent face, and waggled it. "I can't! You know I can't!" she remonstrated in a shrill cockney wail. And straight on the anticipated word the house roared its applause. Off pranced the singer to her encore on cavorting toes, down flourished the conductor's baton in a crash of chords, and away to its fortunes sailed the play, more than ever a confirmed ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... 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, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... 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 of the intensity ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... rung from thousands of throats. As the General drove to Government House, he was greeted by cries of "Avenge Majuba!" and "Bravo, General!" and by the amount of emotion expended and the universal expression of relief evidenced, it was plain that the Cape colonists, like the cockney Londoner, were prepared "to bet their bottom dollar" on the combination of Sir Redvers Buller and ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... 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 ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... of the adventure, were allowed to do so: for the Earl was much disgusted with the raw material out of which he was expected to manufacture serviceable troops. Swaggering ruffians from the disreputable haunts of London, cockney apprentices, brokendown tapsters, discarded serving men; the Bardolphs and Pistols, Mouldys, Warts, and the like—more at home in tavern-brawls or in dark lanes than on the battle-field—were not the men to be entrusted with the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... his life, and he refers to the insults neither in his correspondence nor in his Journal." (Lang's Life of Lockhart, Vol. II, pp. 22 and 24.) Hunt evidently thought that Scott was partly responsible for the articles in Blackwood on the Cockney School. He says, "Unfortunately some of the knaves were not destitute of talent: the younger were tools of older ones who kept out of sight." (Hunt's Lord Byron, etc., Vol. I, p. 423.) In his Autobiography, ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... you, boss," he said, with a curious British cockney accent. "You lookin' for shipwrecked ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... 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 ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... character, dialect, and pronunciation from one another, but also the inhabitants of some cities differ in these respects from those of other cities. An educated Dutchman can tell at once if a man comes from Amsterdam, Rotterdam, or The Hague. The 'cockney' of these places differs, and of such pronunciations 'Hague Dutch' is considered the worst, although—true to the analogy of London—the best Dutch is heard in The Hague. This difference in 'civic' pronunciation is certainly very remarkable when one remembers that The Hague ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... infinite measure of life can be pressed into the great three days. He saw in fancy the procession of the hours, the flight of the dreams, of all the gorgeous intellectual pageants that move through the pages of Saturnalia. For in ninety-two Savage Keith Rickman was a little poet about town, a cockney poet, the poet not only of neo-classic drama, but of green suburban Saturday noons, and flaming Saturday nights, and of a great many things besides. He had made his plans long beforehand, and was prepared to consign ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... The 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 folk ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... to the badly wounded a mixture of beaten egg, hot milk and sugar. Here and there men asked for a piece of chocolate or bread, but most of the wounded wanted only the liquid food. They would say with their awful English cockney accent, "Ah! that's good!" or "Prime stuff!" or "Could you spare a little more, sister?" In spite of dreadful wounds, they were full ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... hill is a cavern called the Hermitage, which once was the retreat of a holy anchorite; but, being now chosen as a place for fetes, has become a sort of cockney spot, and has lost its character of solemnity; but it is the great object of attraction to the inhabitants of Agen, who flock there in crowds on ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... an before a word 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, ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... 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 ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... 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 I ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... stinkin', rotten country!" came, two rows back from where I stood, a Cockney voice uplifted to the leaky skies. "There ain't nothin' to eat in it, and there ain't nothin' to drink ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... 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 ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... old lady, unsatisfied with this genuine specimen of Cockney philosophy, is vowing that if she once gets safe on shore, she will never again set foot in a half-penny boat, we are already at Waterloo Bridge. Duck goes the funnel, and we dart under the noble arch, and catch a passing view ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... considerable merit, though not, as we should now consider, in the first rank of the great caricaturists, had proposed to Messrs. Chapman and Hall, then just starting on their career as publishers, a "series of Cockney sporting plates." Messrs. Chapman and Hall entertained the idea favourably, but opined that the plates would require illustrative letter-press; and casting about for some suitable author, bethought themselves of Dickens, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... 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 and getting ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... passed out into the roadway, and took their place among the slowly moving people there, the Inspector make a way for himself and his companion through the excited, talkative, good-humored Cockney crowd. "There it is! Can't you see it? Up there just like a little yellow worm." "There's naught at all! You've got the cobble-wobbles!" and ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... he loved more than anything else in life, and that rifle was one of them. The other was his platoon commander, Captain Bob Dashwood, who chanced to be coming along the communication at the moment, and the Cockney private's eyes lit up as he ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... simple sound tends to become the symbol for that combination which we call a diphthong. Thus the long i in ride, wine, &c., has become the diphthong ai, and the name of the symbol I is itself so pronounced. In familiar, if vulgar, dialects, A tends in the same direction. In the "cockney'' dialect, really the dialect of Essex but now no less familiar in Cambridge and Middlesex, the ai sound of i is represented by oi as in toime, "time,'' while a has become ai in Kate, pane, &c. In, all southern English o becomes more rounded ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... themselves, than the disciples of Barrington: for the uninitiated to understand their modes of expression, is as impossible as for a Buxton to construe the Greek Testament. To sport an Upper Benjamin, and to swear with a good grace, are qualifications easily attainable by their cockney imitators; but without the aid of our additional definitions, neither the cits of Fish-street, nor the boors of Brentford would be able to attain the language of whippism. We trust, therefore, that the whole tribe of second- rate Bang Ups, will feel grateful for our endeavour ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... heard "Point Judith" mentioned by the New-Yorkers, as the Cockney voyager talks of Sea-reach, or the buoy at the Nore; and here it was close under our lee,—a long, low point of land, with a lighthouse ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... names are cut in Gothic character on the same walls; a further proof that the vanity of man has ever sprouted in much the same way as now. The antiquary, because he has his own prejudices, perceives an abyss between the act of the Cockney tourist of to-day who carves his name upon an old tower or a menhir, and that of a man who five centuries ago, for no better reason than the other, left upon a guard-room wall a similar record of his passage. The man of the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... with a bent pin. Another was to preach a little sermon on a naughty fish. The "application," though brief, was earnest. To the infant expounder, the subject of his discourse doubtless appeared in the guise of a piscatorial Cockney. After many other the like foreshadowings, and after draining dry his native village, he went, when twelve years of age, to Glasgow University. Professor Jardine, who then held the chair of Logic, was fully ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... walks in. He is an English horse trainer, a wide-awake, stocky, well-groomed little cockney. He knows his own mind and sees life altogether through a stable door. Well-dressed for his station, and ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... hours were 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, amid ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... was one of the resorts of citizens on their Sunday walks, who would ascend to the top of the tower and amuse themselves with reconnoitering the city through a telescope. Not far from this tower were the gardens of the White Conduit House, a Cockney Elysium, where Goldsmith used to figure in the humbler days of his fortune. In the first edition of his Essays he speaks of a stroll in these gardens, where he at that time, no doubt, thought himself in perfectly genteel society. After his rise in the world, however, he became too knowing ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... for their arrival, as even the most curious of the Clavering folks. A Londoner, who sees fresh faces and yawns at them every day may smile at the eagerness with which country people expect a visitor. A cockney comes amongst them, and is remembered by his rural entertainers for years after he has left them, and forgotten them very likely—floated far away from them on the vast London sea. But the islanders remember long after the mariner has sailed ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... comparison; either a thing is like Spain, or it is not like Spain. The verdure was "in such condition as it is in the month of May in Andalusia; and the trees were all as different from ours as day from night, and also the fruits and grasses and the stones and all the things." The essay written by a cockney child after a day at the seaside or in the country, is not greatly different from some of the verbatim passages of this journal; and there is a charm in that fact too, for it gives us a picture of Columbus, in spite of his hunt for gold and precious stones, ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... differed on almost all subjects. He was a mass of prejudices, large and small, and Victoria laughed at him. But when she wanted to help any particularly lame dog over any particularly high stile, she always went to Colonel Barton. A cockney doctor attached to the Workhouse had once described him to her as—'eart of gold, 'edd of feathers'—and the ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
