"Costermonger" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... would drive two or three times up and down the street with her load, then turn it out, and take another, and another, until as many as she judged fit had had a taste of the pleasure. This she had learned from seeing a costermonger fill his cart with children, and push behind, while the donkey in front pulled them along the street, to the praise and ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... fellow, wrested the cudgel from his hand, and flung it over the cliff; while Julian was so base, so cowardly, as to reward such generous interference, by holding his weaker brother's arms, and inviting the wrathful costermonger to expend the remainder of his phrensy on unlucky Charles. Yes, and when at home Mrs. Tracy heard all this, she was silly enough, wicked enough, to receive her truly noble son with ridicule, and her other one, the child of her ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... ridicule, on the Unionist leaders, of which Sir Edward Carson came in for the most generous portion. He was by turns everything that was bad, dangerous, and absurd, from Mephistopheles to a madman. "F.C.G." summarised the Balmoral meeting pictorially in a Westminster Gazette cartoon as a costermonger's donkey-cart in which Carson, Londonderry, and Bonar Law, refreshed by "Orangeade," took "an Easter Jaunt in Ulster," and other caricaturists used their pencils with less humour and more malice with the same object of belittling the demonstration with ridicule. ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... Every cabman and costermonger in London knew him by sight and would take off his cap to him if he saw him in the streets, and the poor in the East End knew his tall figure and distinguished countenance better than did the men in the club ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... understand what she said." My pretty, that was Drink, and you may be like that one of these days, for as little as your mother thinks it, if you ever let yourself touch the Curse carelessly. Bless you, I know scores who were once as sweet as you who can now drink any costermonger of them all under the stools in the Haymarket bar. The young men grin and wink as that staggering portent lurches past: I do not smile; my heart is too sad for even a show of sadness. Then there are the children—the children of Drink they should be called, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... at a woman like that when he thinks her a mule or an idiot. We get to learn it in our cradles. But in spite of your superior wisdom, I know I'm right. After the war there won't be a bit of change, really. A duke will be a duke, and a costermonger ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... separation." Quoth he, "I shall not long be separated from thee;" and so saying he fared forth from her and disappeared for the space of an hour, after which he returned home softly walking and hid himself in a place where none could see him. Now after the space of two hours behold, a Costermonger[FN399] came into the house and she met him and salam'd to him and said, "What hast thou brought for me?" "Two lengths of sugar-cane," said he, and said she, "Set them down in a corner of the room." Then he asked her, "Whither is thy husband gone?" and she answered, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... out, and all the details of the hunt; and whether he told it better than I have, or the duke had not heard so many good stories as you have, certain it is that sovereign got so wrapt up in it, that, when a number of courtiers came galloping up and interrupted Martin, he swore like a costermonger, and threatened, only half in jest, to cut off the next head that should come between him and a good story; and when Martin had done, he ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... see what is the characteristic of your country and of your generation at this moment. What a yearning, what an expectation, amid infinite falsehoods and confusions, of some nobler, more chivalrous, more godlike state! Your very costermonger trolls out his belief that "there's a good time coming," and the hearts of gamins, as well as millenarians, answer, "True!" Is not that a clashing among the dry bones? And as for flesh, what new materials ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... stood a public-house, and opposite the door was generally encamped a man who sold nothing but Brazil nuts. Swarms of people lazily wandered past him, most of them waiting for the public-house to open. Brazil nuts on a cold black Sunday morning are not exhilarating, but the costermonger found many customers who bought his nuts, and ate them, merely because they had nothing better to do. We went two or three times to a freethinking hall, where we were entertained with demonstrations of the immorality ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... idlers, and the worst very bad neighbors to have near one in a crowd, or to meet in a dark alley. In England, on the other hand, with its aristocratic institutions, racing is a natural growth enough; the passion for it spreads downwards through all classes, from the Queen to the costermonger. London is like a shelled corn-cob on the Derby day, and there is not a clerk who could raise the money to hire a saddle with an old hack under it that can sit down on his office-stool the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... corners of his mouth out of sight round his broad cheeks. His ample front was decked with a blue apron, suspended from his shoulders, and confined round the convexity of his waist by an old strap which no respectable costermonger would have used as harness. The soup served was by courtesy called soupe maigre, but it was in fact soupe maigre diluted by many homoeopathic myriads, and the Brother showed much curiosity as to my opinion of its ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... who is supposed to have been born of gentle people," he said to his mother afterwards, "Aunt Marian is the most vulgar old beast I have ever beheld. She has the taste of a female costermonger." Which was entirely true, but it might be added that his own was no better and his points of view and morals ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... off the ground I was struck with the clever way in which a London costermonger will turn anything and everything to account. One of them was going about with a truck of cherries, crying out, "Sir Roger Tichborne cherries. Penny ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... interest of science," he said, ultimately. "There was a costermonger family on the floor below, a begging-letter writer in the room behind mine, and two flower-women were upstairs. Perhaps it was a bit thoughtless. But possibly some of ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... while I was at home, a costermonger came to the door with walnuts. The girl answered the bell, and presently I saw the coster and his cart go past the dining-room window. I don't know why it was, or how it was, but a suspicion came over me. I stepped sharply to the door, and looked ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... neighbourhoods where the Donkey goes in at the street door, and appears to live up-stairs, for I have examined the back-yard from over the palings, and have been unable to make him out. Gentility, nobility, Royalty, would appeal to that donkey in vain to do what he does for a costermonger. Feed him with oats at the highest price, put an infant prince and princess in a pair of panniers on his back, adjust his delicate trappings to a nicety, take him to the softest slopes at Windsor, and try what pace you can get out of him. Then, starve ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... about eleven o'clock. The tradespeople, who know how to turn everything to their advantage, saved the gourmands a walk and brought their wares into the office building, where they took up their position on the stairs and in the corridors. A baker sold rolls, a costermonger vended cherries. Certain cakes, however, which were baked by the daughter of a grocer in the vicinity and sold while still hot, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... this neighbourhood; but in London the loads are bigger and the vehicles heavier; while in more hilly parts (as you may see any day in the West Country) two horses are put before a cart and load which the London carter would deem hardly too much for a costermonger's donkey. ...
— Progress and History • Various
... said a breezy costermonger to whom he had appealed, "I think you had better take a 'ansom for the 'orse will know more about London than you seem to do. There's ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... Blood, he speaks terribly! but, for all that, I do not greatly believe him: he looks as like a [155] conjurer as the Pope to a costermonger. [Aside.] ...
— Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... jargon, who in these earnest days would occupy many moments of his time with that? "A Costermonger in this street," says Crabbe, "finding lately that his rope of onions, which he hoped would have brought a shilling, was to go for only sevenpence henceforth, burst forth into lamentation, execration and the most pathetic ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... a shred of covering left; they made him kneel, then made him stand up, blindfolded him then uncovered his eyes; finally they put an end to his long agony by shooting him, and flung the body into a costermonger's cart close to the gate. Several priests had got out of the prison of La Roquette. The Abbe Surat, on passing over a barricade, was so imprudent as to state who he was, and showed some articles of value he had about him. He had got as far as about the middle of the Boulevard du Prince Eugene, ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... was the costermonger. He was straightway put into one of the narrow compartments in the Salad Basket. Then it was the turn of the tipsy and obstreperous workman, who was now silent, ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... it is not barley or bere only which we store up in our 'barns,' nor hogs' fat in our 'larders'; a monody need not be sung by a single voice; and our lucubrations are not always by candlelight; a 'costermonger' or 'costardmonger' does not of necessity sell costards or apples; there are 'palaces' which are not built on the Palatine Hill; and 'nausea' [Footnote: [From nausea through the French comes our English noise; see Bartsch and Horning, Section 90.]] ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... by his driver, he often looks comfortable and sleek, and sometimes wears a red ribbon at each ear. It would not pay to bring on to the ground the scrawny, bony creature that generally tugs in the costermonger's cart. It is in the coal region or trade that you meet with him and his driver in their worst apostacy from all that is seemly in man or beast. To watch the poor creature, begrimed with coal-dust, wriggling up a long, steep hill, ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... indescribably humble, to be something melo-dramatic, foreign, Bohemian, and poetic. It was the mere blind, dull, dead germ of an effort—not even life—only the ciliary movement of an antecedent embryo—and yet it had got beyond Anglo-Saxondom. No costermonger, or common cad, or true Englishman, ever yet had that indefinable touch of the opera-supernumerary in the streets. It was ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... my falling in love with a girl you don't think good enough for me, you have taken the wrong way to keep me from thinking about her, mother. You remember the costermonger whose family quarrelled with him for marrying beneath him? If a girl be a good girl, she is good for me, whether she be the daughter of the cats'-meat-man or of a royal duke! I know that's not the way people who call themselves Christians think! ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... morning of my leaving the inn he learned that a costermonger had found a young woman, sick and bewildered, who, having lost her way, was taken by him to a public-house. He learned the man's name and home. Finding him, the desired information was given. Rapidly driving to the inn, he entered, and saw ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... good humour when the band of theatrical buccaneers, got up by the duke in Spanish costumes, with intent to deceive his lawless tenants in the East-end, came unexpectedly face to face with the genuine buccaneers of the Isle of Dogs, clothed in real costermonger caps and second-hand pilot-jackets of the marine-storedealers' fashionable pattern. It was all only the ridiculous incongruity of our actual society represented in the very faintest shades of caricature ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... temperature of the isothermal lines, when reduced to fractions of an infinitesimal value, has been found to correspond exactly to the elevation of the nap on the hat of a certain sporting Earl. Dividing that by the number of buttons on a costermonger's waistcoat, and adding to the quotient the number of aspirates picked up in the Old Kent Road on a Saturday afternoon, the result has been computed as equal to the total amount of minutes occupied by a vendor of saveloys in advertising his wares in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 5, 1890 • Various
... writ and give it to an officer, who will bring her back. More than this, when the officer has returned the woman, the loving husband has the legal right to "reprove" her. Just what reprove means the courts have not yet determined; for, in a recent decision, when a costermonger admitted having given his lady "a taste of the cat," the prisoner was discharged on the ground that it was only ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... a cart that held a squad Of costermonger line; With one poor hack, like Pegasus, That slaved for ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... barren sea or wood or wilderness. Just a moment; it goes; as, when a well-attuned barrel-organ in a street has drawn us to recollections of the Opera or Italy, another harshly crashes, and the postman knocks at doors, and perchance a costermonger cries his mash of fruit, a beggar woman wails her hymn. For the pinched are here, the dinnerless, the weedy, the gutter-growths, the forces repressing them. That grand tongue of the giant City inspires none human to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... where they are hung up, while oak logs are burnt beneath. In twelve hours they are sufficiently smoked, and then you have the real Yarmouth bloater. I am glad I have seen the process, as I have a horrible suspicion that the costermonger manufactures many a Yarmouth bloater in some filthy Whitechapel slum, the odour of which by no means tends to improve the flavour of ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... a case," he thought, "so mysteriously miserable, so singularly sad, as mine! If she were only white, I would marry her at once, (if she would have me), for the sake of her gentle spirit alone,— ay, even though she were the child of a costermonger; but I cannot, I do not, love a savage, the daughter of a savage chief, with a skin the colour of shoe leather! No, it is impossible! and yet, I am in love with her spirit. I know it. I feel it. I never heard of such a strange ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... deal of style and vulgar "side" is put on; where the house-servants are in livery; the dinner is served on silver plates, in empty mimicry of a ducal mansion; where all travelling sprigs of nobility are welcomed by the proprietor (who was probably a costermonger before his emigration) to whom he is glad to introduce his daughter with the scarcely-veiled recommendation that she has fifty thousand to carry in her hand to the right man, provided he has good English blue blood in his veins and none of the inferior colonial ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... maintain that little cup hot enough to keep up a regular supply of naphtha gas. When the lamp does not burn very well, you will often see the man poking it with a pin. The carbon given off from the naphtha is very disposed to choke up the little hole through which the naphtha runs into the cup, and the costermonger pushes a pin into the little hole to allow the free passage of the naphtha. That, then, is the mechanism of this beautiful lamp of the Whitechapel traders, known as ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy
... sweat of his brow, or even by honest trade, was considered as no fit company for the brood of parasites who hung on to the heels of the Compact, and who nevertheless did not hesitate to perform tasks from which the average costermonger would have shrunk in disgust. Their employers occasionally admitted them to their tables, and even to some degree of social intimacy. More frequently they presented them with their cast-off clothing, with new gowns for their wives at Christmas, or—when things were at a remarkably low ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... Crows watched the boat's approach in a silence broken only once by a long whimper from Ally Bazan. "An' it was a-workin' out as lovely as Billy-oh," he said, "till that syme underbred costermonger's swipe remembered he was Methody—an' him who, only a few d'ys back, went raound s'yin' 'scrag the "Boomskys"!' A couple o' thousand pounds gone as quick as look at it. Oh, I eyn't never goin' to git ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... afterward that my Frenchman had been a costermonger and was now half journalist, half financier, and that my art student was an employee of ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... a trice, with his box and his dice, Mac' pipin my son, but younger, Brings MUMMING in; and the knave will win For he is a costermonger. ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... the bread was rationed all over the city. No one is to have more than 300 grammes per diem; children only 150. I recommend anyone who has lived too high to try this regime for a week. It will do him good. No costermonger's donkey is so overloaded as the stomachs of most rich people. The Government on December 12 solemnly announced that the bread never would be rationed. This measure, therefore, looks to me very much like the beginning of the end. A perquisition is also being made ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... trader, dealer, monger, chandler, salesman; changer; regrater^; shopkeeper, shopman^; tradesman, tradespeople, tradesfolk. retailer; chapman, hawker, huckster, higgler^; pedlar, colporteur, cadger, Autolycus^; sutler^, vivandiere^; costerman^, costermonger^; tallyman; camelot; faker; vintner. money broker, money changer, money lender; cambist^, usurer, moneyer^, banker. jobber; broker &c (agent) 758; buyer &c 795; seller &c 796; bear, bull. concern; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... things have been said about religious slumming and political or social slumming, but surely the most despicable of all is artistic slumming. The religious teacher is at least supposed to be interested in the costermonger because he is a man; the politician is in some dim and perverted sense interested in the costermonger because he is a citizen; it is only the wretched writer who is interested in the costermonger merely because he is a costermonger. Nevertheless, so long as he is merely ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton |
