"Cockney" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... must try to exercise a trifle of imagination, and put yourself, perhaps with an effort, into some sort of sympathy with these people, or how am I to write to you? I think you are truly a little too Cockney with ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that most of them were 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 the hint. ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... conductor, born in London and still a cockney, has succeeded in extracting thrills from the alphabet—imparting excitement to the names of the national capitol's streets. On a recent Sunday morning he was ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... and, but for the 'gentleman' and that slight but ineradicable twang that clings like Nessus' shirt to the cockney, all effort and all education notwithstanding (it will even last three generations, and is audible, perhaps, now and then in the House of Lords), her speech was correct and even dainty in ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... breaking the thing into pieces with her bare hands. Then she went out. At the door on the landing she very nearly stepped against a little cockney. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... necessarily rustic, even suburban. There is no provincial quite so provincial as he who has passed his life in great cities. The Parisian boulevardier taken away from the asphalt, the cockney a little off Clapham Common and the Strand, is lost. Henry Adams knew his London and his Paris, his Boston and his Quincy—we must not forget Quincy—well. But he had been born, and had grown up, between the lids of history, ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... hazardous work of cleaning up the wharves and warehouses and sprinkling them with petroleum. Six prisoners volunteered, but they might better have served out their terms, for the next day four of them were dead. Though the stout Cockney, harbormaster, known as "Pinkie" because of his rosy complexion, was pallid with fear, the other European residents of Sandakan seemed utterly indifferent to the danger to which they were exposed. But life in a land like Borneo breeds fatalism. As an official ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... the Cockney accent, but not in an offensive degree; his manners were not flagrantly ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... Cockney English with a slight foreign ascent— cutting the wire of a champagne bottle.] Why, you used to be a regular slap-up dancing man ...
— The 'Mind the Paint' Girl - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... 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 ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... mannerisms 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 his ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... and stood in a ring round us when we stopped to interview a railway official. The beautiful, bronze-haired, ox-eyed young woman in her disreputable attire—I have never seen a broken black feather waggle more shamelessly—was a sight indeed to strike wonderment into the cockney mind. And perhaps her association with myself added to the incongruity. I am long and lean and unlovely, I know; but it is my consolation that I look irreproachably respectable. Of the two I was infinitely the more disturbed by the public attention. "Calm and unembarrassed ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... who dwelt all the year round in the midst of his own people, was to be examined by the minister, whose native tongue, like that of his flock, was Gaelic, and who was as awkward and ineffectual, and sometimes as unconsciously indecorous, in his English, as a Cockney is in his kilt. It was a great occasion: the keen-eyed, firm-limbed, brown-cheeked little fellows were all in a buzz of excitement as we came in, and before the examination began every eye was looking at us ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... possible, worse than mine, but it was he who had started the subject. "Ham," I said to him, "is jambon. Go ahead." W. went ahead, but "high" in the sense he wanted did not seem to be in the dictionary. I had a try when W. gave up and began with an explanation of the cockney's difficulty with the letter "h." Madame smiled uncomprehendingly. W., who had studied the dictionary while I talked, made a fresh start at "je suis." "Je suis—I am. Jambon—ham, c'est a dire ''am' a Londres.'" We worked away all through that meal. At supper, ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... La Ferte Mace, Garibaldi was in the habit of expressing himself—chiefly at the card table, be it said—in a curious language which might have been mistaken for French. To B. and me he spoke an equally curious language, but a perfectly recognizable one, i.e., Cockney Whitechapel English. He showed us a perfectly authentic mission-card which certified that his family had received a pittance from some charitable organisation situated in the Whitechapel neighbourhood, and that, moreover, they were in the habit ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... Rupert was ever better at making way than drawing off. Gad, sir, for my own poor share, I did but go into the house of a poor widow lady, who maintained a charge of daughters, and whom I had known of old, to get my horse fed, a morsel of meat, and so forth, when these cockney-pikes of the artillery ground, as you very well call them, rallied, and came in with their armed heads, as boldly as so many Cotswold rams. I sprang down stairs, got to my horse,—but, egad, I fancy all my troop had widows ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... Quarterly notice is of so much import in the life and death of Keats, and in the genesis of Adonais, that I shall give it, practically in extenso, before closing this section of my work: with Blackwood I can deal at once. A series of articles On the Cockney School of Poetry began in this magazine in October, 1817, being directed mainly and very venomously against Leigh Hunt. No. 4 of the series appeared in August, 1818, falling foul of Keats. It is difficult to say whether the priority in abusing Keats should ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... rural villages, picturesque parks, and elegant casinos. With the exception of Constantinople, 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 air of ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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 boots and a straw ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... 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 of Lord Mountpromise, ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... Snuyt uw neus, Blow your nose. 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
... fleet limbs! and over it should rise a monument, at sight of which every friendly highlandman would say, Feiich an cabracli mor de Clanruadli! What a mockery of fate to be exposed for ever to the vulgar Cockney gaze, the trophy of a fool, whose boast was to kill! Such a noble beast! Such a mean man! To mutilate his remains for the pride of the wretch who killed ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... resigned 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 unlike that ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... made next 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 ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... twice saw a small ragamuffin band with tins for kettle-drums. Just wouldn't there be a fine scrap if a similar band of London children had suddenly rounded the corner! Personally, I would back the cockney spirit against any other. This was my second visit to Hanover, and on no occasion had I seen a motor other than the one ambulance car, though I heard two in the distance. Owing to the scarcity of rubber I was surprised at the number of bicycles present ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... '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 ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... mother could see me now," Bill the Cockney remarked. "My, she wouldn't think me 'alf a cove. It's a balmy. I discovered the (p. 021) ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... little doubt," proceeds the cockney historian, "that the conversion of Clovis was as much a matter of policy as of faith." But the cockney historian had better limit his remarks on the characters and faiths of men to those of the curates ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... upon Boston for a home, and lived with his family in the rooms above his shop; and my grandmother Smith dropped her "aitches" with the cheerful ease of one to the manner born, bless her stout old Cockney heart! I can remember her hearing me my spelling-lesson of a night, her spectacles far down on her old button of a nose, her white curls ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... country,...' (you'll like this, Flint) 'but I confess—to be duly modest—that I love it best in books. In real life I have remarked that it is frequently damp and rheumatic, and most hated by those who know it best.... Though a cockney in grain, I love to lean upon the farmyard gate; to hear Mrs. Poyser give a bit of her mind to the squire; to be lulled into a placid doze by the humming of Dorlecote Mill; to sit down in Dandie Dinmont's ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... fun as a Cynic could ask, To see how this cockney-bred setter of rabbits Takes gravely the Lord of the Forest to task, And judges of ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... 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
... ago, of those disintegrating, decomposing processes now authoritatively going on. Yes; although Booth must be class'd in that antique, almost extinct school, inflated, stagy, rendering Shakspere (perhaps inevitably, appropriately) from the growth of arbitrary and often cockney conventions, his genius was to me one of the grandest revelations of my life, a lesson of artistic expression. The words fire, energy, abandon, found in him unprecedented meanings. I never heard a speaker or actor who could give such a sting to hauteur or the taunt. I ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... 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]
... pole to pole-the man lives here Whose razor's only equall'd by his beer; And where, in either sense, the cockney-put May, if he pleases, get confounded cut. On the sign of an Alehouse kept ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... an over-dressed, showy individual a shade more of a cockney than himself, interposed with ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... said he, in the softly insinuating way of the Cockney, 'but I thought that maybe the lidy would like to see Mr. Carlyle's statue. That's 'im, sir, a-sittin' in the overcoat with the book ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... with a decided Cockney accent]. Oh, my dear, talk about an afternoon! We 'ave 'ad ...
— Fanny and the Servant Problem • Jerome K. Jerome
... 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
... vital point is here. The abstract barbarian would copy. The cockney and incomplete civilisation always sets itself up to be copied. And in the case here considered, the German thinks that it is not only his business to spread education, but to spread compulsory ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... his Unionist neighbours who, so he said, were far more loyal to England than England quite liked. He hated the English accent ... "finicky bleatin'," he called it ... and declared, though he really knew better, that all Englishmen spoke with a Cockney intonation. "A lot of h-droppers," he called them, adding, "God gave them a decent language, but they haven't the gumption to talk it!" The Oxford voice, in his opinion, was educated Cockney, uglier, if possible, ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... evening. Is there any message?" The intonation was cockney; it reminded him of the ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... a cockney, all right," replied Wilson, "and I think I'm all the better for that. Especially at this job, ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... the case of all men in the trenches, I heard things and stories that especially impressed me, so I have written them as hearsay, not taking to myself credit as their originator. I trust that the reader will find as much joy in the cockney character as I did and which I have tried to show the public; let me say now that no finer body of men than those Bermondsey boys of ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... resentment at this boisterous intrusion of the men from the rival camp, the smooth, oily and inviting voice of the unprincipled Sidney Duck, scenting easy prey because of their inebriated condition, called out in its cockney accent: ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... but every one expected as their right (for a preacher was nothing then who could not prove himself "a good Latiner"); and graced, moreover, by a somewhat pedantic and lengthy refutation from Scripture of Dan Horace's cockney ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... then to Hastings, and Godpapa had a letter this morning to say that they found it so hot at Hastings that they went on to Folkestone, and they are there now. The Admiral has to report for the information of his Cockney readers that he hoisted his Flag yesterday at the main peak. The weather was, however, so windy and wet that after hiding himself with his honoured father under the cuddy for half an hour, the Admiral thought that prudence was part of his duty, therefore struck ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... each other, the poet recumbent upon the bed and a classmate ready to carry off the manuscript for the paper of the following day. 'Blackwood's' was then in its glory, its pages redolent of 'mountain dew' in every sense; the humor of the Shepherd, the elegantly brutal onslaughts upon Whigs and Cockney poets by Christopher ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... esquires came to the capital thrice in their lives. Nor was it yet the practice of all citizens in easy circumstances to breathe the fresh air of the fields and woods during some weeks of every summer. A cockney, in a rural village, was stared at as much as if he had intruded into a Kraal of Hottentots. On the other hand, when the lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished from ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... really not to abuse Scotland in the pleasant way he so often does in the sylvan shades of Enfield; for Scotland loves Charles Lamb; but he is wayward and wilful in his wisdom, and conceits that many a Cockney is a better man even than Christopher North. But what will not Christopher forgive to genius and goodness! Even Lamb, bleating libels on his native land. Nay, he learns lessons of humanity even from the mild malice of Elia, and breathes a blessing on him and ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... 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 ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... on a cargo of best steaming coal for Kamrangh Bay. This knowledge enabled Togo to destroy the Baltic fleet in the Tushima Straits. And a stevedore made something like a million dollars out of a cargo of canned salmon by hearing some cockney give his theory about how the blockade could ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... me over a barrel, so, with a parting threat, I left him. A tent nearby was being run as a restaurant, and there I had a cup of coffee. Of the man who kept it, a fat, humorous cockney, I made enquiries regarding the girl. Yes, he knew her. She was living in ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... fellow, I am a mere cockney," rejoined Sir Wynston; "I am not a sportsman; I never tried it, and should not like to begin now. No, Dick, what I much prefer is, abundance of your fresh air, and the enjoyment of your scenery. When I was at Rouen ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the Cockney's antithesis to the moonlight and hills of you country folk," Nora observed, as she pointed to the yellow lights gashing ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... behold her when she drives past. 'They can never get enough of it.' As one of their own writers has observed, a London tradesman may have been swindled a hundred times by real or sham noblemen, and yet no sooner does some flaunting cheat with the air noble enter his shop, than the cockney bows low and implores patronage with a cringing zeal only equaled by ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 process of becoming a millionaire ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... countenance, and, without any resort to paints or cosmetics, had somehow or other given to the expression of his face an impudent, low-bred expression, with a glass screwed on to his right eye,—such a look as a cockney journeyman, wishing to pass for a "swell" about town, may cast on a servant-maid in the pit of a ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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.
... yet expensive, but Mr. Boyd thinks that railroads will have a cheapening influence. He quotes some present prices, which would make the hair of a Londoner stand on end! Imagine the feelings of the comfortable cockney who found himself face to face with a breakfast bill for nine shillings! For this modest sum Mr. Boyd was supplied with tea, ham, eggs, marmalade, and toast, in fact, the little commonplace things that we have come to consider as the natural ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... is not such 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. At the northern end is a small town, grey, with some red roofs ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... saloon opened to admit a short, spare, hollow-chested, dapper young Englishman, whose insignificant Cockney countenance was splashed with orange-coloured freckles of immense size. Between his thin anaemic lips dangled the inevitable cigarette. And Emigration Jane, toying with the dregs of her tumbler, recognized the pert, sharp, sallow face seen over the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... 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 hand in the forecastle; until often the result is undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man's place of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... supported horizontally on the branches of the trees, and a third planted perpendicularly in the ground. These cimeaux are intended as a sort of treacherous invitation to the birds to come and rest themselves. So regularly as Sunday morning arrives, the Marseillais Cockney installs himself in his pit, arranges a loophole through which he can see what passes outside, and waits with all imaginable patience. The question that will naturally be asked, is—What ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... Brunai, the capital of the Yang di Pertuan, the Sultan of Brunai, aetat one hundred or more, and now in his dotage: the abode of some 15,000 Malays, whose language is as different from the Singapore Malay as Cornish is from Cockney English, and the coign of vantage from which a set of effete and corrupt Pangerans extended oppressive rule over the coasts of North-West Borneo, from Sampanmangiu Point to the Sarawak River in days gone by, ere British enterprise stepped in, swept the Sulu and Illanun pirates from the sea, and ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... times. Of his life the more that is said in charity the better; for as the sun rises oftentimes from a fog bank, so the luminous dreams of color by which we know Turner emanated from an apparently sour, prosaic cockney. A bachelor implicated in low intrigues, dying under the assumed name of "Puggy Booth" in a dreary lodging in Chelsea, after a long career of miserly observance and rapacious bickering—of his life naught became him like the leaving. He died December 19, 1851. His will directed that his ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... English to my friend, and then, looking up and down the street each way to see if we were being watched, he addressed me in English with a strong Cockney accent. ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... business grew and prospered. Aristophanes of Byzantium wrote glossaries and grammars, collected editions of Plato and Aristotle, aesthetic disquisitions on Homer—one wishes they were preserved, for the sake of the jest, that one might have seen an Alexandrian cockney's views of Achilles and Ulysses! Moreover, in a hapless moment, at least for us moderns, he invented Greek accents; thereby, I fear, so complicating and confusing our notions of Greek rhythm, that we shall never, to the end of time, be able to ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... sister, Your face is writhed with jeers; How awful is the angle Of those protuberant ears! Those red, protuberant ears! And your splay feet—O lor!!! My loud, my Cockney sister, Where ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 20, 1892 • 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
... kind of sweetness and innocence—perhaps what some would call "greenness"—that at home I had associated only with country boys, and not even with them latterly. The smartness and knowingness and a certain hardness or keenness of our city youths,—there was no trace of it at all in this young Cockney. But he liked American travelers better than those from his own country. They were more friendly and communicative,—were not so afraid to speak to "a fellow," and at the hotel were ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... unfortunate 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, Mrs. Gudgeon was a ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Paris when you ennuied yourself so enormement?" asked a yellow-haired English girl who had painted countless vaporous and ravishing Eurydices and filmy Echoes from broad-waisted, pug-nosed Cockney models, and who always declared that she would recognize a "professional" even among the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... lull in the conversation and then a small, wiry, spiteful looking Cockney spoke. He had reddish hair and big round spectacles ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... 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
... became animated. Voices waxed roaringly loud or piercingly shrill. The little Bolshevik, suddenly losing her round faced calm and the shepherdess look in her eyes, burst forth in a voluble outcry in praise of the beauty of anarchy, expressing herself in broken English, spoken with a cockney accent, in broken French and liquid Russian. Enid Blunt, increasingly guttural, and mingling German words with her Bedford Park English, refuted, or strove to refute, Jennings's ecstatic praise of French verse, citing rapidly poems composed by members of the Sitwell ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... for his 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
... 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 compliments for me to ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... left 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 could find, our camp oven ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... to excite appetite, one takes the gentle oyster, so we, before the serious pleasure of our journey, tasted the Adirondack region, paradise of Cockney sportsmen. There through the forest, the stag of ten trots, coquetting with greenhorns. He likes the excitement of being shot at and missed. He enjoys the smell of powder in a battle where he is always safe. He hears Greenhorn blundering ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... with a lion. But shells are no respecters of spirit. Jimmy had successfully fought poverty and ill-health; he had risen from a newspaper-boy's existence to the dizzy heights of a milkman's cart. His pale face with its prominent eyes and rich, chestnut forelock bore an expression of indomitable Cockney confidence in the ultimate decency of things. He had always been kind to his mother. "More like a girl than a boy," she said, "in the way he cared for his home and looked after me." And now Jimmy was dead: ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... away to the south-west is Dean Prior, and the living that Herrick held when he poured out his grumbles and complaints about 'dull Devonshire.' Herrick was a true Cockney, and the earliest part of his life was spent in a house in Cheapside. When he grew up, he had the good luck to come into the brilliant and witty company that gathered round Ben Jonson, so it must be allowed that he had an excuse for sometimes thinking that life in ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... not blunt?" responded Charles, but no one save the traveller at the small table caught the play on words, the Cockney cant term for money being unfamiliar to American ears. He smiled, and then studied the bond-servant with more interest than he ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... learned are not at all like any that have been used in bygone days. The corruption of Paris seems to breed verbal distortions rather freely, and the ordinary babble of the city workman is as hard to any Englishman as are the colloquialisms of Burns to the average Cockney. ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... were soft-hearted or soft-headed, they would say the whole family were prisoners. One thing that surprised and shocked us was to hear the little kids swearing; they would use the most frightful oaths, and the funny part of it was that they gave them the pure cockney twang; I suppose they had heard and were imitating the Imperial troops. Well, after travelling all day we finally arrived in C—— and we were marched off to our first billets. I belonged to "C" Company and we were quartered in a barn connected with ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... Cristobal, Panama and the Canal Zone of 1907; Spiggoty policemen like monkeys chattering bad Spanish, and big, smiling Canal Zone policemen in khaki, with the air of soldiers; Jamaica negroes with conical heads and brown Barbados negroes with Cockney accents; English engineers in lordly pugrees, and tourists from New England who seem servants of their own tortoise-shell spectacles; comfortable ebon mammies with silver bangles and kerchiefs of stabbing scarlet, ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... it not, in these days of cockney tours and “Cook” couriers? At any rate, one that we, with plenty of time on our hands and a weakness for out-of-the-way corners and untrodden paths, found it ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... said 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 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... but 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 ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... "wholly wanting." Channing alludes to "large views of human nature"—the thief can be content with nothing less than "enlarged" ones. Finally, the American having been satisfied with a reference to "subjects which have absorbed the most glorious understandings," the Cockney puts him to shame at once by discoursing about "subjects which have occupied and absorbed the most glorious of human understandings"—as if one could be absorbed, without being occupied, by a subject—as if "of" were here any thing more than two superfluous letters—and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... nothing? Indeed, he said much, and I hung upon every syllable that fell from his lips, but, to my indescribable chagrin, it was a mere voluble jargon of statements, which simply baffled and puzzled me and caused me pain. Our charge would stare at us stolidly, and then remark, in a vulgar Cockney voice, that he was quite sure we were going the wrong way. By this time, I should mention, we had re-clothed him in his trousers and shirt, for he had obviously suffered terribly ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... course, is entirely free from that ramrod stiffness which some of the Irregular Cavalry cultivate with such painful assiduity; he sits easily and gracefully, so easily that you might fancy a rough horse would set him bobbing and slipping like a cockney astride a donkey on the sands. But with all the ease and grace, there is strength there, such as would wear down the nastiest of bad brutes. The leg that looks so lightly and gracefully posed grips like steel, and the pressure increases relentlessly the more the horse quarrels with his rider. ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... injury. Mrs. Sparrow chirped with delight at sight of the gaudy monstrosity. Having got the house cheap, they were going to spend their small amount of energy upon internal decoration. That was their idea clearly, a "Liberty interior." She looked more like a Cockney sparrow than a country one—had been born and bred in Regent ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... try 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 in ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... one of us, but she is like us all the same, and I'll be sorely grieved if she'll give up her light-heartedness and her pleasantry to win that Cockney.' ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... 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. And even the nobler animals—the lions and bears—are not allowed to escape without ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... made up of ignorance and conceit. It has a mixture of slang in it. 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. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... silly countenance, but I arrested my doubled fist. He stared right through me. So did the others as they joined him. The old man went and peered under the bed, and then they all made a rush for the cupboard. They had to argue about it at length in Yiddish and Cockney English. They concluded I had not answered them, that their imagination had deceived them. A feeling of extraordinary elation took the place of my anger as I sat outside the window and watched these four people—for the old lady came in, glancing suspiciously about her like a cat, trying to understand ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... you the plain truth, my dear Mrs. M—-, my art (she was English, and cockney, and dreadfully mangled the letter h whenever it stumbled into a speech) ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... to woman's estate, and yet could not cook a meal. Through the green 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 ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey |
