"Costermonger" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of compassion. She was so young, and so pretty—beautiful was the word, rather. It seemed too cruel. If only she would not say anything more about it! How could she? was it because he was a physician? He would go and be a costermonger if that— ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... to him for the town. The neighborly offer of the country to console her for the loss of the town she received with alarm, hastening to bethink herself that God cared more for one miserable, selfish, wife-and-donkey-beating costermonger of unsavory Shoreditch, than for all the hills and dales of Cumberland, yea and all the ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... during which a wag in the crowd quietly picked the costermonger's pocket of the fish with a deftness born of much practice, and sent it flying over the room. It was promptly returned, and found a devious way back to its owner in a somewhat dusty and ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The old ones and then the young were discussed—their weight, their gameness, their hitting power, and their constitution. Who, as he saw Sheridan and Fox eagerly arguing as to whether Caleb Baldwin, the Westminster costermonger, could hold his own with Isaac Bittoon, the Jew, would have guessed that the one was the deepest political philosopher in Europe, and that the other would be remembered as the author of the wittiest comedy and of the finest ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 thing before,—a man in love with a portion of ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... was, there was in it an attempt, though 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 ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... 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 him, harness him anyhow ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... complimentary; for the alternative supposition presumed him that mean and well-known character—the merchant, who basely paid for what he took. It was plainly asking—Are you a knight grand-cross of some martial order, or a sort of costermonger? And we give it as no hasty or fanciful opinion, that the South Sea islands (which Bougainville held to be in a state of considerable civilization) had, in fact, reached the precise stage of Homeric Greece. ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... upon our horses; nor are 'haversacks' sacks for the carrying of oats; 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 ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... university age, even if they could always afford the fees of these exceptional schools. It may be edifying to tell a duke that our public schools are all wrong in their constitution and methods, or a costermonger that children should be treated as in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister instead of as they are treated at the elementary school at the corner of his street; but what are the duke and the coster to do? Neither of them has any effective choice in the matter: their children must either go to the schools ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... desolation of aspect common to the whole suburb, was in a high state of perfection in this part of it. Irreverent street noises fainted dead away on the threshold of the ornamental gates, at the sight of the hermit lodge-keeper. The cry of the costermonger and the screech of the vagabond London boy were banished out of hearing. Even the regular tradesman's time-honored business noises at customers' doors, seemed as if they ought to have been relinquished here. The frantic falsetto of the milkman, the crash of the furious butcher's ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... plays yet," said Ashton; "that man depicts a certain style of life, and he must be true to it. If he enacts the part of a costermonger, he must swear and talk slang, and commit crimes, if need be, or anything suiting the character he assumes; or else the thing would be absurd, and the gentleman and costermonger would ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... 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 ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 5, 1890 • Various
... me lots of things. How he killed a mad dog, and nursed a man with smallpox, and knocked down a costermonger for kicking his pony. That was brave, wasn't it?" said Kitty, who clearly regarded the last item as the ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... these series simply adopts Italian numerals decimally. But the other, when it has reached 6, having had enough of novelty, makes 7 by 6-1, and so forth. It is for no abstract reason that 6 is thus made the turning-point, but simply because the costermonger is adding pence up to the silver sixpence, and then adding pence again up to the shilling. Thus our duodecimal coinage has led to the practice of counting by sixes, and produced a philological curiosity, a ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... likes and their dislikes for a few picturesque and outstanding figures. These they will attack or defend with fervour. But you will be lucky if you overhear any serious discussion of policy. Emerge from the nether world. Range over the whole community—from the costermonger who says 'Good Old Winston!' to the fashionable woman who says 'I do think Mr. Balfour is rather wonderful!'—and you will find the same plentiful lack of interest in the impersonal side of polities. You will find that almost every one is interested in politics only ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... dusty dry road, nothing to be seen but other high brick walls, with here and there an apple-tree or a lilac, or the half-developed flower-turrets of a chestnut looking over—nothing to be seen but a mean little costermonger's cart, with a hapless donkey, and, down in the direction of St Roque's, the long road winding, still drier and dustier. Ah me! was it paradise inside? or was it only a merely mortal lawn dropped over with apple-blossoms, blue ribbons, and other ...
— The Rector • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... his first picture to a costermonger in Madrid for a bag of peas, is represented at the Champ de Mars by several canvases, the smallest of which would bring forty thousand francs. His best works are in France. The Wedding at the Vicarage, his chef-d'oeuvre, belongs to Madame de Cassin; M. Andre owns his Serpent-Charmer; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... propria persona: but they quite recovered their 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 upon the stage; but it made the incongruities ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... lucky enough to escape the robber-crabs, the pigs, and the monkeys, as well as to avoid falling into the hands of man, and being converted into the copra of commerce, or sold from a costermonger's barrow in the chilly streets of ungenial London at a penny a slice, it may very probably succeed in germinating after the fashion I have already described, and pushing up its head through the surrounding foliage to the sunlight above. As a rule, the coco-nut has ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... 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 ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... 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 ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... "Come, come, young man," he said, grunting between the words. "Come! Don't be too greedy. You had that big Finn in your watch all the voyage. I will do what's fair. You may have those two young Scandinavians and I... Ough!... I get the nigger, and will take that.... Ough! that cheeky costermonger chap in a black frock-coat. I'll make him.... Ough!... make him toe the mark, or my.... Ough!.... name isn't Baker. Ough! ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... street a stream of men and women poured from every door, and went to swell the main cataract which had risen suddenly in full flood in the Strand. The donkey-barrow of a costermonger passed me, loaded with a bluejacket, a flower-girl, several soldiers, and a Staff captain whose spurred boots wagged joyously over the stern of the barrow. A motor cab followed, two Australian troopers on the roof of that, with a hospital nurse, her cap awry, sitting across the ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... man," 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 ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... went 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 ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... 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 ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... 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. ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... to be referred to costermonger, originally a dealer in costards, i.e. apples. It is sometimes for Mid. Eng. costard (cf. such names as Cherry and Plumb), but may also represent Port. da Costa and Ger. Koester, both of which are found in ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... at her with a sideways look of appreciation, yet faroff, almost insolent. The woman drew herself up. There was a certain costermonger richness about her. She did not know what Ursula was after, she was on her guard, hostile. Birkin approached, smiling wickedly at seeing Ursula so nonplussed ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... 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 ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... leading to it, are thronged with carts of all sorts, sizes, and descriptions, from the heavy lumbering waggon, with its four stout horses, to the jingling costermonger's cart, with its consumptive donkey. The pavement is already strewed with decayed cabbage-leaves, broken hay-bands, and all the indescribable litter of a vegetable market; men are shouting, carts backing, horses neighing, boys fighting, basket-women talking, piemen expatiating ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... 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 wholly ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... 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, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... man looks 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 a costermonger." ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... well-built, well-groomed man of thirty odd years whose slight stoop and cultured air of tolerance marked him a ''Varsity man' as plainly as cap and gown could have done. Just behind him a costermonger in a riot of buttons was indulging in philosophic quips of a cheerfully vulgar nature. A few yards back a massive labourer with clear untroubled eye and powerful muscles stood out like a superior being to the three who were alongside. Half-way a poet marched. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... cart that held a squad Of costermonger line; With one poor hack, like Pegasus, That slav'd ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... Pole without gulping in their throats. Dilton gave me an example of the human note. There was a bye-election in the East End the other day and one of the candidates put his unfortunate infants into 'pearlies' and hawked them about the constituency in a costermonger's barrow, carrying a notice with 'Vote for Our Daddy!' on it. Dilton damned near blubbed when he told me ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... would be pleased with a glimpse of London. (Cheers.) You all like London, do you not? (Applause.) With your kind permission, I will re-appear as a noted character in the great tragic comedy of the world's Metropolis. (Dives down and comes up as a Costermonger. Prolonged applause.) What cheer! (Laughter.) Well, you blokes what are you grinning at? I am a chickaleary cove, that's what I am. But I know what would knock you! You would like to 'ear about 'Ome Rule. Eh? What cheer! 'Ere goes. (Reveals his Home-Rule scheme with a Cockney ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... these degenerate days, where a great 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 ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... 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 windows ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... carried to the apartment 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
... 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
... children bubbling over with life. Here, although the everlasting club, to which he is born, is wielded 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, ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... time she meets me, for the limits of endurance have been passed. If she kills me I shall die a martyr in the cause of the Queen's peace. And if it is only one woman, then it was the same lady, more than half intoxicated, that I saw in the Whitechapel Road cruelly ill-treating a little costermonger. If it was not she it was certainly her sister, and I do not care who ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... The street-venders, who cry cassada-cakes, palm-oil, pepper, pieces of beef, under such names, as agedee, aballa, akalaray, and which are therefore as unintelligible as the street-cries of London. This is the costermonger type. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... 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' ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... benefactors of the poor were originally men of moderate means. Some of them were at one time poor men. Sir Joseph Whitworth was a journeyman engineer with Mr. Clement, in Southwark, the inventor of the planing machine. Sir Josiah Mason was by turns a costermonger, journeyman baker, shoemaker, carpet weaver, jeweller, split-steel ring maker (here he made his first thousand pounds), steel-pen maker, copper-smelter, and electro-plater, in which last trade he made his fortune. Mr, Peabody worked his way up by small degrees, from a clerk in ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... more true than that the human mind from accident, from grief, or from that mysterious excitement, during which in half an hour a blaspheming costermonger "gets religion" and becomes a saint of God—nothing is more certain than that the human mind can like this, at a flash, turn topsy-turvy; the good coming to the top, the bad going to the bottom. Mechanical ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... are commonly 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 Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... especially the fruit shops, interested her greatly, as well as the vehicles of every description, from the humble costermonger's to the handsome broughams bearing their wealthy owners to their offices for the day; the prettily-dressed children who toddled beside their busy mothers to their early shopping; and, above all, the strains of a brass band which was enlivening the morning hours with its familiar repertoire. ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... so. You may put him to other work if you choose; but, by the condition you have brought him into, he will dislike the other work as much as you would yourself. You get hold of a scavenger, or a costermonger, who enjoyed the Newgate Calendar for literature, and "Pop goes the Weasel" for music. You think you can make him like Dante and Beethoven? I wish you joy of your lessons; but if you do, you have made a gentleman of him:—he won't like to go back to ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the street that the men with difficulty reached the hearse. As the female mourners stepped across the pavement with handkerchiefs held to their mouths, a sigh of satisfaction was audible throughout the crowd; the males were less sympathetically received, and some jocose comments from a costermonger, whose business was ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... speaking a grander tongue than 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 Bardic ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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
... 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 ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... 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 of the patriarchs and Jewish heroes, and arguments to prove that the personal ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... train to his ugly portrait,—for the lady was to sit to him that same afternoon,—that the idea of home was already leaving Oldcastle Hall, and flitting back to the suburban cottage haunted by the bawling voice of the costermonger. ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... Protectionist 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 ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... Constitution. The legislation is detested, wherever it is even felt. The other day a Cambridge don complained that, when out bicycling with his boys, he had to leave them in the rain while he drank a glass of cider. Count the whole series of human souls between a costermonger and a Cambridge don, and you will see ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... else to do, nursemaids chiefly and errand boys, with now and then a perambulating costermonger added, would gather on the common of a fine morning to watch them pass, and cheer the most deserving. It was not a showy spectacle. They did not run well, they did not even run fast; but they were earnest, and they did their best. The exhibition appealed less to one's sense of art than to one's ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... those happy days he had grumbled at his lot. He remembered confiding to a friend in the station-house, as he rubbed with liniment the spot on his right shin where the well-shod foot of a joyous costermonger had got home, that this sort of thing—meaning militant costermongers—was 'a bit too thick'. A bit too thick! Why, he would pay one to kick him now. And as for the three loyal friends of the would-be wife-murderer who had broken his nose, if he saw them coming ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... a broom, "Why are you on the crossing, James? Is your father Hill?" and is informed "No. He's drove mother down to Hascot." More personal was such work as "The Stags, a Drama of To-day," in which a retired thimblerigger and an unfortunate costermonger, under a magnificent alias, take advantage of the railway mania to make their application for shares—for which they could not pay, of course, if things went wrong—in accordance with the game of "heads I win, tails I vanish," at that time extensively played throughout the country. Later ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... 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, ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... 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
... Faustus and Amyntas, discourse in a cottage while the snows of January whirl without. Amyntas has learned in London "to go so manerly." Not a wrinkle may be found in his clothes, not a hair on his cloak, and he wears a brooch of tin high on his bonnet. He has been hostler, costermonger, and taverner, and sings the delights of the city. Faustus, the rustic, is contented with his lot. The 'Cytezen and the Uplondyshman' was printed from the original edition of Wynkyn de Worde, with a preface by F. W. Fairholt, Percy ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... even the observation of the costermonger leaning over his barrow near the Assize Court when one morning Sir Henry was going in ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... individuals? With the help of a microscope and the intelligent exercise of his reason, he would in time conceive the truth. He would put Covent Garden Market on the field of his microscope, and would perhaps write a great deal of nonsense about the unerring "instinct" which taught each costermonger to recognise his own basket or his own donkey-cart; and this, mutatis mutandis, is what we are getting to do as regards our own bodies. What I wish is, to make the same sort of step in an upward direction which has already been taken in a downward one, and to show reason for ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... in Petersburg a young man of eighteen, hardly more than a boy, who carried on a small business as a costermonger, went in broad daylight into a moneychanger's shop with an ax, and with extraordinary, typical audacity killed the master of the shop and carried off fifteen hundred roubles. Five hours later he ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the new order, is blighting our literary life. It is not easy to see how, in such an atmosphere, great and noble books can ever again come into being. May it, perhaps, be hoped that once again the multitude will be somehow touched with disgust?—that the market for "literary" news of this costermonger sort ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... the hare. There is no answer unless their function is to hear the bray of a fellow-ass.... One may object that that majestic sound is surely of force to impress itself without any aid from an external ear; but that is a vain argument built on the costermonger's moke—dreary exile from its fatherland. Remember that its ancestors wandered on the steppes of Central Asia or the borders of the Sahara. In those boundless solitudes, with nothing that eye can see or that common ear can hear to remind her that she ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... to him]. With an uncle a costermonger, and an aunt who sold matches. It wouldn't have made any difference to you, would it? You didn't marry me for my family, did you? You ...
— Fanny and the Servant Problem • Jerome K. Jerome
... shall begin it with the background of all his father meant to give him. The law of England will not believe in his claims unless they can be proven. She can prove nothing. I can prove nothing for her. If she had been a little female costermonger she would have demanded her 'marriage lines' and clung to them fiercely. She would have known that to be able to flaunt them in the ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the vulgar costermonger to bestride his long-ear'd Arabian, and belabor his panting sides with merciless stick and iron-shod heels to impel him to the goal in the mimic race—or the sleek and polish'd courtier to lick the dust of his superiors' feet to obtain a paltry ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... evidently well content with himself and the world in general. His artist's kit revealed his profession even to the uncritical eye, but no student of men could have failed to guess his bent were he habited in the garb of a costermonger. The painter and the poet are the last of the Bohemians, and John Trenholme was a Bohemian to ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... satisfied with his own character; and his pride is too deep-seated to appear at all on the outside. Careless alike of praise or blame, he can afford to be truthful. Too far, in fancy, above the rest of mankind to trouble about their petty distinctions, he is equally at home with duke or costermonger. And valuing no one's standard but his own, he is never tempted to practice that miserable pretense that less self-reliant people offer up as an hourly sacrifice to the god of ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... the worst nuisances first), the begrimed sweep, the butcher, the hawker, the ignorant costermonger, the 'cute cabby, the wily tradesman, who seeks favors and pockets frowns from his distinguished clowns—the Lord, whose rank is known by his tinsel, and the Duke, so deeply identified with flunkeyism,—all ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... 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 them ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... between you and me, do you agree? But before we come to close quarters, as you say in England, I wish to know whether the argument is to be conducted on lines that befit gentlemen. On the last occasion when we differed, you used the methods of the costermonger." ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... visit, it must be remembered, happened nearly forty years ago, when social demarcations in England were far more rigidly defined than at present; then, the wife of a costermonger with a donkey did not visit the wife of a costermonger who had to wheel his ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Irish families, water is the only beverage at dinner, with punch afterward; and estimating the number of teetotallers, among the English at three hundred, there are six hundred among the Irish, who constitute, it may be remembered, only one-third of the whole costermonger class, and those Irish teetotallers, having taken the pledge under the sanction of their priests, look upon it as a religious observance and keep it rigidly. The number of Irish teetotallers has been considerably increased since Mr. Mayhew made his returns, in ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... I am not ashamed to admit that I have no idea how this could have been done. Shakespeare himself, who apologizes for trying to make a cockpit hold the vasty fields of France, might have been excused for not attempting to decant The Universal Deluge into a receptacle scarcely bigger than a costermonger's barrow. Of the three remaining cars, Sin was beyond comparison the finest both in conception and execution. Perhaps he would have looked the part more obviously if he had had more of a once-aboard-the-lugger ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... opportunity of showing that you are on familiar terms with the sun, moon, rain, wind, and weather in general. Do this, as a rule, by means of classical tags vulgarised down to the level of a costermonger's cart. ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... fashion; I made certain of a woman of the pavement and of ladies of the boudoir, of a hospital nurse, of a Greenwich pensioner, of two flower-girls sitting on the edge of one basket, of a shoeblack (I think), of a costermonger, and a nun. Others there were, and more than one or two of most categories: in a ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... albeit his equipment would not have won him credit or recognition as "a sporting man" at a costermonger's skurry in Battersea-fields, had the quick eye, bright look, and keen expression of feature common to all knowing ones in the noble art of venerie: he managed to make his dogs obedient, and kept them well together during a ride of some six ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... was a letter indeed, to be intercepted by a man's father, and do him good with him! He cannot but think most virtuously, both of me, and the sender, sure, that make the careful costermonger of him in our familiar epistles. Well, if he read this with patience I'll be gelt, and troll ballads for master John Trundle yonder, the rest of my mortality. It is true, and likely, my father may have as much patience as another man, for he takes much physic; and oft taking physic ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... a bargain with young Wakeham; I undertook to teach him to be funny in return for his teaching me this costermonger's whistle. ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... 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 |
