"Cockney" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the dales, and educated chiefly among the carriers' carts at the back of York railway- station. His name was Learoyd, and his chief virtue an unmitigated patience which helped him to win fights. How Ortheris, a fox-terrier of a Cockney, ever came to be one of the trio, is a mystery which even to- day I cannot explain. 'There was always three av us,' Mulvaney used to say. 'An' by the grace av God, so long as our service lasts, three av us they'll always ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... murderers in County Clare as you ever fought with in Clapham Junction, Mr. Cockney," ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... whom so far drill and six months in the North-west Territory of Her Majesty's Indian dominions had not made muscular-looking; though, for the matter of that, he did not differ much from his companions, who in appearance were of the thorough East-end Cockney type—that rather degenerate class of lads who look fifteen or sixteen at most when twenty. Stamina seemed to be wanting, chests looked narrow, and their tunics covered gaunt and angular bodies, while their spiked white helmets, though they fitted their heads, had rather an extinguisher-like ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... within the building, the results of which are shewn in 'Cocoa Paste,' 'Rock Cocoa,' 'Eating Vanilla Chocolate,' 'Penny Chocolate,' 'French Bonbons,' 'Flaked Cocoa,' 'Homoeopathic,' &c. So numerous are the sorts, that a purchaser is as much puzzled in his choice as an untravelled Cockney with a Parisian bill of fare. The making of the flaked cocoa is peculiarly interesting, and is, we were informed, peculiar to this establishment. To see how the amorphous mass comes from the mill in long curling ribbons, uniform in thickness and texture, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... want poking about 'ere?" the man demanded in Cockney English in a surly tone. "I don't understand your lingo, but say something, or ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... 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, ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... old woman, who had spoken tearlessly, as from a dead, tearless heart, of the worst essentials of her tragedy, was caught by a sob at something in this memory of the ship at the Nore—why, Heaven knows!—and her voice broke over it. To Aunt M'riar, cockney to the core, a ship was only a convention, necessary for character, in an offing with an orange-chrome sunset claiming your attention rather noisily in the background. There were pavement-artists in those days as now. This ship the old lady told of was a new experience for her—this ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... own uncleanness, and its leading characteristics are gloom, ugliness, prurience, preachiness, and weedy flabbiness of style. That it has not flourished in Great Britain, save among a small and discredited Cockney minority, is due to the inherent manliness and vigour of the national character. The land of Shakespere, Scott, Burns, Fielding, Dickens, and Charles Reade is protected against literary miasmas by the strength of its humour and the sunniness of ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... to imitate the Cockney frivolity of Barry Cornwall, who never went to sea in his life, but who nevertheless carolled the most absurdly joyous lays regarding the ocean, which made him ill even when he merely looked at it. No; the true sea-lover ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... overflowed with marmalade and honey, and that the manna of delicious scones and cakes fell even upon deserted waters of crag and heather. He knew that their way would lie through much scenery whose rude barrenness, and grim economy of vegetation, had been usually accepted by cockney tourists for sublimity and grandeur; but he knew, also, that its severity was mitigated by lowland glimpses of sylvan luxuriance and tangled delicacy utterly unlike the complacent snugness of an English pastoral landscape, with which it ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... cried Jenks, desisting from further efforts, "that I have not recently read one of Bret Harte's novels, or I would speak to you in the language of the mining camp. But in plain Cockney, Miss Deane, we are on to a good thing if only we ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... fought with. It was their political independence only. It secured nothing beyond that. Morally we were not independent. Socially, we were not independent. There was a time, we can all remember it, when we literally trembled before every cockney that strangled innocent aspirates at their birth. We had not secured our moral independence of Europe, and particularly not of our own kindred and people. We literally crouched at the feet of England, and begged for recognition like a poor, disowned relation. We scarcely knew what was right ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... other sort of thing, and is usually an Irishman or an Irishman's son. For two dollars and a half a day he will drive you to Melville Island, or Parry's Sound, if you will only stick by him; and he jogs along, smoking his dudeen, over corduroy roads, through mud holes that would astonish a cockney, and over sand and swamp, rocks and rough places enough to dislocate every joint in your body, all his own being anchylosed or used to it, which is the ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... "One of our cockney lads, more of a patriot than a linguist, looked at this for a moment and then lampblacked a big sign of his own, which he raised ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... the first dismal warning. For some reason or other I had to go down into the basement of the school. The janitor, a highly efficient but exceedingly bad-humoured cockney, who was dissatisfied with all things Canadian because "in the old country we do things differently"—whose sharp tongue was feared by many, and who once remarked to a lady teacher in the most casual way, "If you was a lidy, I'd wipe ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... with a villainous cockney accent? Who was capable of murdering the Queen's English any day ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... adorning most of the American rivers. Owing to the difficulty of procuring summer carriages, and in some decree to the rudeness of the soil, in the Upper Province especially, boats are in much more general use; and excursions on the water, are as common to that class "whose only toil is pleasure." as cockney trips to Richmond, or to any other of the thousand and one places of resort, which have sprung into existence, within twenty miles of the Metropolis of England. Not confined, however, to picking daisies for their doxies, as these said cockneys do, or carving their vulgar names ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... on its native heath and the City clerk on the loose, however, were not prone to such vestments as young Mr. Karslake affected. It wasn't that he overdressed; even the ribald would have hesitated to libel him with the name of a "nut"—which is Cockney for what the United States knows as a "fancy (or swell) dresser"; it was simply that he was always irreproachably turned out, whatever the form of dress he thought appropriate to the time of day; and ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... Nesbit. A little, wiry fellow, with cheerful Cockney speech, he stood chalking his cue at a window. "I say, what's the matter one piecee picnic this week? Pink Pagoda, eh? Mrs. Gilly's ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... could his accent undeceive me. For as there is a lingua franca of many tongues on the moles and in the feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there is a free or common accent among English-speaking men who follow the sea. They catch a twang in a New England Port; from a cockney skipper, even a Scotsman sometimes learns to drop an h; a word of a dialect is picked up from another band in the forecastle; until often the result is undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man's place of birth. ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... great distance from London, and, as a consequence, many of London's choicest blackguards migrated there from time to time. During the hopping season, and while the local races were on, one might meet with two Cockney twangs ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... Mr. Maurice Kingsley, "Uncle Henry's settling in Eversley was a great event.... At times he fairly bubbled over with humour; while his knowledge of slang—Burschen, Bargee, Parisian, Irish, Cockney, and English provincialisms—was awful and wonderful. Nothing was better than to get our uncle on his 'genteel behaviour,' which, of course, meant exactly the opposite, and brought forth inimitable stories, scraps of old songs and impromptu conversations, the choicest of which ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... stinkin', rotten country!" came, two rows back from where I stood, a Cockney voice uplifted to the leaky skies. "There ain't nothin' to eat in it, and there ain't nothin' to ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... to Government House, he was greeted by cries of "Avenge Majuba!" and "Bravo, General!" and by the amount of emotion expended and the universal expression of relief evidenced, it was plain that the Cape colonists, like the cockney Londoner, were prepared "to bet their bottom dollar" on the combination of Sir Redvers Buller and ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... Cassidy led him, wondering, to the barred corridor without and slammed the door behind them. "Not a word do you whisper of this to any man, Pat Quinlan," said he, never relaxing his grasp. "You heard what that Cockney Fitzroy was swearin' to this morning? Sure—you'd never say the word to back ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... encountered my tutor, half-dressed, a candle in hand. 'Twas a queer figure he cut, thinks I—an odd, inconsequent figure in a mysterious broil of the men of our kind. What was this cockney—this wretched alien—when the passions of our coast were stirring? He would be better in bed. An eye he had—age-wise ways and a glance to overawe my youth—but what was he, after all, in such a case as this? I was his ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... rhododendron-lined private driveway. He walked shyly along the iron fence for a quarter of a mile before he got up courage to go back, rush through the towering iron gateway and past the gate-house, into the sacred estate. He expected to hear a voice—it would be a cockney servant's voice—demanding, "'Ere you, wot do you want?" But no one stopped him; no one spoke to him; he was safe among the rhododendrons. He clumped along as though he had important business, secretly patting his tie into shape and ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... discretion has given a noble dignity to a record through which shines the unquenchable human spirit. One passage, full of affectionate discernment about London, will cause a flicker of just pride in everyone who is authentic Cockney, whether by birth or adoption. A big book of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... pierheads, and the workmen, humoured by the dockman's jest, give us a hoarse cheer as they scurry across the still moving bridge. In time-honoured fashion our Cockney humorist calls for, 'Three cheers f'r ol' Pier-'ead, boys,' and such of the 'boys' as are able chant a feeble echo to his shout. The tugs straighten us up in the river, and we breast the flood cautiously, ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... have given some curious instances of Cockney and other rhymes. I am sorry to see that the offensive r not only appears to be gaining ground in poetry, but also in the mouths of many whose station and education might have been supposed to preserve them from this vulgarism. If ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various
... several of the churches made over into barracks, or riding-schools; the market closed; the State House filled with lounging officers; and the streets thronged, even at this early hour, by a varied uniformed soldiery, speaking Cockney English, the jargon of the counties, Scottish Gaelic, or guttural German, as they elbowed their passage, the many scarlet jackets interspersed with the blue of artillery and cavalry, the Hessian red and yellow, the green of the rifle-corps, or the kilts of the Highlanders. ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... a cat waiting for its chin to be stroked the conductor sat with extended baton. Down to the footlights she minced, delicately as Agag to the downfall of his hopes, thrust out an impudent face, and waggled it. "I can't! You know I can't!" she remonstrated in a shrill cockney wail. And straight on the anticipated word the house roared its applause. Off pranced the singer to her encore on cavorting toes, down flourished the conductor's baton in a crash of chords, and away to its fortunes sailed the play, more than ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... saying at London, among servants,' writes that good-natured theatrical wag, Tate Wilkinson, 'was, "I wish you were at York!" which the wronged cook has now changed for, "I wish you were at Jamaica." Scotland was then imagined by the cockney as a dreary place, distant almost as the West Indies; now'(reader, pray note the marvel) 'an agreeable party may, with the utmost ease, dine early in the week in Grosvenor Square, and without discomposure set down at table on Saturday or Sunday in the new town of Edinburgh!' From which we ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... 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, ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... you about that anxious night. He gave himself away then. I don't think he remembered much of what he had said next morning. It seemed sad to me his self-revelation. He said he did not know what in the world to do, he felt so ill and anxious. He was a Cockney born, and he had loved his South London work. He really wanted to tackle the job in front of him here. But the romance was there behind him in that English city the unique sense of being in the right place ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... like the roaring of a tornado! Look, they have settled down again on the other side of the ravine. Well, here, Peter, what do you think of the fun now?—fourteen cock pigeons and one hen, to be divided between us. This is what I call sport: none of your reed-birds and meadow-larks, such as cockney sportsmen frighten away from the fields of Jersey or Long-Island. Here they come again by scores. Now let us see how good a shot you are. Two cocks on the topmost branch of that old maple, full forty ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... under the trees in the soft summer twilight, smoking their pipes and drinking in the melodious utterances. An indistinct idea that this was pastoral happiness pervaded the camp. "This 'ere kind o' think," said the Cockney Simmons, meditatively reclining on his elbow, "is 'evingly." It reminded him ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... Charles II. seem at once more human and more detestable than the passions and poisons of the Renaissance, much in the same way that a monkey appears inevitably more human and more detestable than a tiger. Compared with the Renaissance, there is something Cockney about the Restoration. Not only was it too indolent for great morality, it was too indolent even for great art. It lacked that seriousness which is needed even for the pursuit of pleasure, that discipline which is essential even to a game of lawn tennis. ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... ill dressed or disreputably poorly dressed people, quite accustomed to the place, and mostly plodding about somebody else's work, which they would not do if they themselves could help it. The little energy and eagerness that crop up show themselves in cockney cupidity and business "push." Even the policemen and the chapels are not infrequent enough to break the monotony. The sun is shining cheerfully; there is no fog; and though the smoke effectually prevents anything, whether faces and hands or bricks and mortar, from looking fresh and clean, it ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... the "cockney" improvements that had lately taken place, among which the venerable castle ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... grown up and looked back at his early childhood—he was seven years old in the year in which his father was able to see the new St. Wilfred's an edifice complete except for consecration—it seemed to him that his education had centered in the prevention of his acquiring a Cockney accent. This was his mother's dread and for this reason he was not allowed to play more than Christian equality demanded with the boys of Lima Street. Had his mother had her way, he would never have been allowed to play with them at all; but his father would sometimes break ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... shepherd, a drover, a rat-catcher, a mole-catcher, and a hundred other things; in any one of which, he is as different from the sheepish, straw-hatted, and ankle-booted, bill-holding fellow of the print-shop windows, as a cockney is from ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... polish, and decorated only by forced and often pointless puns. His sentiment had T.W. Robertson's insipidity without its freshness, and restored an element of vulgarity which his predecessor had laboured to eradicate from theatrical tradition. He could draw a "Cockney" character with some fidelity, but his dramatis personae were usually mere puppets for the utterance of his jests. Byron was also the author of a novel, Paid in Full (1865), which appeared originally in Temple Bar. In his social relations he had many friends, among whom ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... November," he went on, with a tone which made Geoff glance at him in surprise. Somehow in the last few words the countryman's accent seemed to have changed a little. Geoff could almost have fancied there was a cockney twang about it. ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth
... 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, ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... might be the sentiments of an eager speculator who found himself among primitive folk. But the discord of ideas puts the whole piece so completely out of tune as to produce only a harsh and jarring sensation; the rough Western man is thoroughly out of his element, and flounders heavily, like a cockney among mediaeval crusaders. This must be taken in fairness to be the result of collaboration, for in his own short stories Mr. Kipling never commits solecisms of the kind; on the contrary, he excels in the shading of strong local colours, and in the rapid, unerring delineation ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... watched their eccentric career from the banks. Three 'ARRIES at large on a Bank Holiday Could hardly indulge in more blundering pranks. Stroke "catches a crab" in the clumsiest style, (And they called him a fine finished oarsman, this chap!) At his "Catherine-wheeler" a Cockney might smile, As he tumbles so helplessly back in Bow's lap. And Bow!—well, he's snapped off the blade of his scull, And poor Cox's steering-gear's all "in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 5, 1890 • Various
... non-essentials, yet, perhaps, enough of variance is observed to make it noticeable and altogether piquant to the wide-awake Yankee, who, in turn, balances the Western "reckoning" by his unique "kalkilations." But neither are as absurd as the Cockney, who gets off his ridiculous nonsense, as, for example, the following: "Ho Lord, help us to take hold of the ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... not give: the buying and selling of plants, grain, and kine, the meddling with new grafted trees, the mending of spaliers, the straightening of fences, the going round (with the self-importance and impatience of a cockney) to see what flowers had opened, what fruit had ripened over-night; to walk through the oliveyards, among the vines; to pry into stable, pig-stye, and roosting-place, taking up handfuls of drying grain, breaking twigs of olives, to see how things were ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... off the Tower. How he had come into the service was not known in the present ship; but the fact was, that he had been one of the swell mob—and had been sent on board the Tender with a letter of recommendation from the magistrates to Captain Crouch. He was a cockney by birth, for he had been left at the work-house of St Mary Axe, where he had been taught to read and write, and had afterwards made his escape. He joined the juvenile thieves of the metropolis, had been sent to Bridewell, obtained his liberty, ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... less peculiar to themselves, than the disciples of Barrington: for the uninitiated to understand their modes of expression, is as impossible as for a Buxton to construe the Greek Testament. To sport an Upper Benjamin, and to swear with a good grace, are qualifications easily attainable by their cockney imitators; but without the aid of our additional definitions, neither the cits of Fish-street, nor the boors of Brentford would be able to attain the language of whippism. We trust, therefore, that the whole tribe of second- ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... Knight, who so manfully clove down the sturdy wight, Wat Tyler, in Smithfield—a hero worthy of honorable blazon, as almost the only Lord Mayor on record famous for deeds of arms, the sovereigns of Cockney being generally renowned as the ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... Chronicle, and reprinted in book form, in 1836, as Sketches by Boz. The success of these suggested to a firm of publishers the preparation of a number of similar sketches of the misadventures of cockney sportsmen, to accompany plates by the {268} comic draughtsman, Mr. R. Seymour. This suggestion resulted in the Pickwick Papers, published in monthly installments, in 1836-1837. The series grew, under Dickens's hand, into a continuous, though ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Sybil's entreaties the cab-driver hurried on. With all the skilled experience of a thorough cockney charioteer he tried to conquer time and space by his rare knowledge of short cuts and fine acquaintance with unknown thoroughfares. He seemed to avoid every street which was the customary passage of mankind. The houses, the population, the costume, the manners, the language ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... judgment of the cockney who buttered his horse's hay, the ragged boy skinned her mice and plucked her sparrows in my absence. The consequence was her untimely end. I was met by my landlady with many a melancholy "Ah, sir!" and actually the good creature had ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... doubt he is there now," said Holgate, with a fat laugh. "And a wise man, too. I always betted on the little cockney's astuteness. But, doctor, if you don't hurry up, I fear we shall ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... Bates was a Cockney by birth, but always he had had an ambition to take a farm, and after twenty years of work as a skilled mechanic he had thrown up a well-paid job, and dared the uncertainties which beset the English farmer. That venture was a constant bone of strife between him and his wife. Mrs. ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... her was never properly known, as neither of them belonged originally to that neighborhood in which he had, several years ago, purchased large property. It was said he had got her in London; and nothing was more certain than that she issued forth the English language clothed in an inveterate cockney accent. She was a high moralist, and a merciless castigator of all females who manifested, or who were supposed to manifest, even a tendency to walk out of the line of her own peculiar theory on female conduct. Her weight might be about eighteen stone, exclusive of an additional stone of gold ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... a moment, 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
... to Stockleigh?" he asked. The soft sing-song intonation common to all Devon voices fell very pleasantly on ears accustomed to the Cockney twang ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... the water, we do know the explanation," said the detective. "I didn't tumble to it at first myself, being a Cockney; but a little talk with Jake and the other fisherman about the old smuggling days put me straight about that. But I admit the dried remains still stump us ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... "Point Judith" mentioned by the New-Yorkers, as the Cockney voyager talks of Sea-reach, or the buoy at the Nore; and here it was close under our lee,—a long, low point of land, with ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... kindness in that poor little Cockney's finger than there is in your whole body!" Cecilia whispered, apparently addressing the unoffending cloth—which, having begun life as a dingy green and black, did not seem greatly the worse for its new decoration. ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... Fruit of many kinds is cheap, abundant and good. Sydney is not a prohibition town! Far from it. Drink conditions are as bad as in Scotland. Many of the people, especially from the country, have a pure Cockney accent and drop their h's freely; indeed I met boys and girls born in the colony, and never out of it, whose Cockney pronunciation was quite comical. It struck me that Australians and New Zealanders are certainly not noted ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... door, with some condescension. When the last flimsy parcel had been taken within, Mrs Budd brought in Mrs Perkins and the baby to introduce them to Mavis. Mrs Perkins sat down and assumed a manner of superfine gentility, while she talked with a Cockney accent. Her mother remained standing. The dust-cloak lived in Kensington, it informed Mavis, "which was so convenient for the West End: it was only an hour's 'bus ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... had sent him, picking his way among the orange boxes, the moving farms, and the wig-makers of Covent Garden, he had come upon a sculptor's shop, oddly crowded in among Cockney carters and decaying vegetables. Faces of Greece and Rome gazed at him suddenly from a broad window, and for a few moments he forsook the motley beauty of modern London for the ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... many foolish ones, which made the men laugh very much; but their laughter did not hurt me the least bit in the world, because everybody laughed on that ship, even the sailors who served the dishes, and especially one grizzly old salt, a cockney from Wapping, who for some ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... temporary lull in the conversation and then a small, wiry, spiteful looking Cockney spoke. He had reddish hair and big round ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... another rick, you two," said Adrian. "Arrange that we go. You haven't seen the cockney's Paradise. Abjure Blazes, and taste ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... certain whether he was a tallow-chandler or a button-maker; a third, who had met with him somewhere, described him as a damned ass; a fourth said, 'Oh, don't be hard on him; he's only a vulgar old Cockney, without an h in his whole composition.' A chorus of general agreement followed, as the dinner-hour approached: 'What a bore!' I whispered to my friend, 'Why do they go?' He answered, 'You see, one must do this sort of thing.' And when we got to ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... good a nyme as another," said Benito, essaying the cockney speech. "And what ye daon't know won't 'urt you, my friend." He threw down a silver piece, took the bottle and glass with him and sat down at a table near the corner. Hard by he had glimpsed the familiar broad ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... as I was coming out of the chancery of the British Legation, a little cockney messenger in uniform came snorting into the court on a motor-cycle. As he got off he began describing his experiences, and wound up his story of triumphant progress—"And when I got to the Boulevards I ran down a blighter on a bicycle and the crowd ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... the outer door of the Queen's apartments in Holyrood Palace, where Rizzio was murdered. Sir Walter Scott has made these blood marks the subject of a jocular passage in his introduction to the "Chronicles of the Canongate," where a Cockney traveller is represented as trying to efface them with the patent scouring drops which it was his mission to introduce into use in Scotland. In another of his novels—"The Abbot"—Sir Walter Scott alludes ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... the velocity of lightning, amidst the astounding shouts of the multitude, and was instantly followed by his biped and quadruped foes of indescribable diversity, from the amateur of the turf on his spirited and well caparisoned steed, to the spavined gelding, bearing its cockney rider, and numerous other annual equestrians, preceded by every description of the canine race, from the high bred beagle to the "cur of low degree." All was tumultuous dissonance, and confusion worse confounded. Tallyho enjoyed ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... a Cockney who came next in the line, "that all wounded are going to 'ave a nice little gold stripe to wear—a stripe ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... Spain. The verdure was "in such condition as it is in the month of May in Andalusia; and the trees were all as different from ours as day from night, and also the fruits and grasses and the stones and all the things." The essay written by a cockney child after a day at the seaside or in the country, is not greatly different from some of the verbatim passages of this journal; and there is a charm in that fact too, for it gives us a picture of Columbus, in spite of his hunt for gold ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... with the ladies a couple of days later to Hampton Court, Willie Woodley being also of the party. The afternoon was charming, the famous horse chestnuts were in blossom, and Lord Lambeth, who quite entered into the spirit of the cockney excursionist, declared that it was a jolly old place. Bessie Alden was in ecstasies; she ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... ought to be an urbane people, a civilizing people—above such petty irritating things. I'd as soon put barbed wire along the footpath across that field where the village children go to school. Or claim that our mushrooms are cultivated. Or prosecute a Sunday-Society Cockney for picking my primroses. Custom-houses indeed! It's Chinese. There are things a Great Country mustn't do, Stephen. A country like ours ought to get along without the manners of a hard-breathing competitive cad.... ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... up his mind to that act, he is not ashamed to name it; neither, on the other hand, does he rant about it, and talk about Philistine prejudices and higher laws and brides in the sight of God, after the manner of the cockney decadent. He was breaking a social law, but he was not declaring a crusade against social laws. We all feel, whatever may be our opinions on the matter, that the great danger of this kind of social opportunism, this pitting of a private necessity against ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... stepped the little drill sergeant, a finished example of precise, graceful movement. He was explaining in clean cut, and evidently memorised speech the details of the movements he wished executed, but through his more formal and memorised vocabulary his native cockney would occasionally erupt, adding vastly to the pungency and ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... 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: the message had come that ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... of the 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 sleeve ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... our pouched pugilist, though his chance looks poor, Will come up smiling soon, surviving failure; And an admiring ring will shout once more, (Pardon the Cockney rhyme!) "Advance, Australia!!!" ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... footsteps never tread, There is a store of treasure hid. If it be so, I have no doubt, Some lucky wight will find it out. Yet so or not is nought to me, For I shall ne'er go there to see." The man did slyly twice or thrice The Cockney thenk for his advice; Then heame agean withoot delay He cherfully did tak his way. An' set aboot the wark, an' sped, Fun' ivvery thing as t' man had said; Were iver efter seen to flourish T' fanest gentleman iv all t' parish. Folks wonder'd ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... been for Mrs. Nevill Tyson, Stanistreet might have been faintly amused at the idea of this little cockney cosmopolitan persuading himself that his contemptible vices were part of the pageant of the world. As it was he was disgusted. He, too, was a sinner in all conscience; but his sins and his repentance had been alike simple and sincere. ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... against vagabondage will come from the children themselves. For them freedom will not mean the expensive kind of savagery now called "the simple life." Their natural disgust with the visions of cockney book fanciers blowing themselves out with "the wind on the heath, brother," and of anarchists who are either too weak to understand that men are strong and free in proportion to the social pressure they can stand and the complexity ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... in Livery: or the Footman's Miscellany. 1732. A rhyme in the motto on the title-page shows what a Cockney muse Dodsley's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... half a minute to digest the fact that I could understand his cockney. Lucie became almost hysterical with laughter and ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... among them what my fancy had pictured among the serrated chines and green gorges of St. Vincent, Guadaloupe, and St. Lucia, hanging gardens compared with which those of Babylon of old must have been Cockney mounds. The rock among these mountains, as I have said already, is very seldom laid bare. Decomposed rapidly by the tropic rain and heat, it forms, even on the steepest slopes, a mass of soil many feet in depth, ever increasing, and ever sliding into the valleys, mingled with blocks and slabs ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... do believe you think me a Cockney—a metropolitan barbarian! But I persist in seeing no merit and no superior innocence in being shut up even in precincts of rose-trees, away from those great sources of human sympathy and occasions of mental elevation and instruction without which many natures grow narrow, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... for participating in the advantages of a residence in London—for frequenting gin-palaces and music-halls, for observing the beauties of the West End and cultivating the society of appreciative housemaids. To a ragged and simple-minded rustic or to a young Cockney of vague resources all this ought to be a brilliant picture. That the picture should seem to contain any shadows is a proof of the deep-seated relish in the human mind for our personal independence. The fear of "too many masters" weighs heavily against the assured comforts ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... the heave and fall of the old barque's blunt bows, and left in shadow the double row of bunks and the chests on which the men sat. From his seat nearest the ladder, Bill, the ship's inevitable Cockney, raised ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... the nose. Cooper. 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
... arbitrary genus, And as arrogant as HOWELLS In their dealings with the vowels. Love, move, rove, linked in a sonnet, Pass for rhymes; the best have done it!) Then again there is Magenta! Surely science never sent a Handier rhyme to—well, polenta, Or (for Cockney Muses) Mentor! The poetic sense auricular Can't afford to be particular. Rags of rhymes, mere assonances, Now must serve. Pegasus prances, Like a Buffalo Bill buck-jumper, When you have a "regular stumper" (Such as "silver") do not care about ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 103, November 26, 1892 • Various
... treat to see any one enjoy anything as you enjoy this music," she said to me. She spoke well, perhaps rather too carefully, and with a hint of the cockney accent. ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... 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 more ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... if one is quiet in London, there is nothing like its quietness— there is a grandeur about its smoky fogs, and the dull distant sounds of cabs and coaches; in fact you may perceive I am becoming a thorough-paced Cockney, and I glory in thoughts that I shall be here ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... was all about I cannot imagine; all I know is that that evening, in the meadows near C—, a wretched Cockney, in a battered chimney-pot hat, and carrying an umbrella, was wantonly run to earth by a handful of natives, and that an hour later the same unhappy person was clapped in the village lock-up for the night as a suspicious character! It had all been tending to this. Fate ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... COCKNEY, a word of uncertain derivation, but meaning one born and bred in London, and knowing little or nothing beyond it, and betraying his limits by his ideas, manners, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... stagnation. Men like myself prefer to be at the heart of things—to live close to the centre of activity. London is the nucleus of England; not only the seat of government, but the focus of intellect, of art, of culture, of all that makes life worth living; and please do not put me down as a cockney, Miss Lambert, if I confess that I love these crowded streets. I am a lawyer, you know, and human nature ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... backstay. Now, the two captains of the foretop were both prime young men, active as monkeys, and bold as lions. One was named Tom Herbert, from North Shields, a dark, good-looking chap, with teeth as white as a nigger's, and a merry chap he was, always a-showing them. The other was a cockney chap. Your Lunnuners arn't often good seamen; but when they are seamen, there's no better; they never allow any one to show them the way, that's for sartin, being naturally spunky sort of chaps, and full ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... interrupted a voice in vigorous cockney, "this 'ere tide ain't in the 'abit o' waitin'. If we go to-night, we go this minute, sir!" It was the skipper, and the ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... its way, as prolific of contrasts as any part of the United States. There is certainly no more cultivated centre in the country, and yet the letter r is as badly maltreated by the Boston scholar as by the veriest cockney. To the ear of Boston centre has precisely the same sound as the name of the heroine of Wagner's "Flying Dutchman," and its most cultivated graduates speak of Herbert Spencah's Datar of Ethics. The critical programmes of the Symphony Concerts are prepared by one of the ablest of ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... to the dance hall, closed at this hour to its nocturnal patrons, where she knew she would find Tom Martin in the office back of the main room. He was there as she expected—a keen-eyed, sharp-featured little cockney whose history from the time he disappeared from London in a fog to the day when he emerged in this unlikely corner of the great United States would have made a thrilling story—particularly to the English police! Through the open door of his office he was keeping an eye on the activities of several ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... cockney at 'eart, Annie," repeated that functionary. "The country says nothing to you. You want the parks, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... themselves out of the adventure, were allowed to do so: for the Earl was much disgusted with the raw material out of which he was expected to manufacture serviceable troops. Swaggering ruffians from the disreputable haunts of London, cockney apprentices, brokendown tapsters, discarded serving men; the Bardolphs and Pistols, Mouldys, Warts, and the like—more at home in tavern-brawls or in dark lanes than on the battle-field—were not the men to be entrusted with the honour of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... old man said it was no matter,—"only we would have called him Marquis," said he, "if his name was not provided for him. We must not leave him here," he said; "he shall grow up a farmer's lad, and not a little cockney." And so, instead of going the grand round of infirmaries, kitchens, bakeries, and dormitories with the rest, the good old soul went back into the managers' room, and wrote at the moment a letter to John Myers, who took care of his ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... of hawks they were as ever came from Germany!"—the falconers were in despair, and Churchill saw that the fault was his; and it looked so like cockney sportsmanship! If Horace had been in a towering rage, it would have been well enough; but he only grew pettish, snappish, waspish: now none of those words ending in ish become a gentleman; ladies always ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... not only the dampness and the incessant maxim fire we had to contend with here, but an army of insects, which jumped about us in battalions, and saw to it we were never lonely. A Cockney member of our company, after catching a particularly active jumper, called out: "Now then, you blighter, ...
— A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire • Harold Harvey
... another person on the scene. "In November, 1835," continues Mr. Chapman, "we published a little book called the Squib Annual, with plates by Seymour; and it was during my visit to him to see after them that he said he should like to do a series of cockney-sporting plates of a superior sort to those he had already published. I said I thought they might do, if accompanied by letter-press and published in monthly parts; and, this being agreed to, we wrote ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... summer and winter resorts of the North Atlantic, from the desolate rocks called the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the ever-bland Madeira and the over-bright Bahamas. The varied company of the isles embraces even Wight, where Cockney consumptives go to get out of the mist, and the Norman group consecrated to cream and Victor Hugo. The author's good descriptive powers are assisted by a number of drawings, many of which are finely done and well ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... was taking 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
... 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
... manners of these primitive countries; if not strictly virtuous, they are, at all events, terribly attractive. Existence in a tropical wilderness, in the midst of a voluptuous and half-civilized race, bears no resemblance to that of a London cockney, a Parisian lounger, or an American Quaker. Times there were, indeed, when a voice was heard within me that spoke of nobler aims. It reminded me of what I once was, of what I yet might be, and commanded imperatively a return to a healthier and more active life. But I had allowed myself to be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... that the South Seas and them islands was full of queer happenings, anyhow. Said that Eri's yarn reminded him of one that Jule Sparrow used to tell. There was a Cockney in that yarn, too, and a South Sea woman and a schooner. But in other ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... greater among the mass in New England, than it is anywhere else in this country, at this very moment. One leading New York paper, edited by New England men, during the last controversy about the indemnity to be paid by France, actually styled the Due de Broglie "his grace," like a Grub Street cockney,—a mode of address that would astonish that respectable statesman, quite as much as it must have amused every man of the world who saw it. I have been much puzzled to account for this peculiarity—unquestionably one ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... in his bitterness cries out that "the town has overflowed the country," meaning the whole country, and that "we are cockney from sea to sea," he is being tragic at the cost of truth. Would he drag Wiltshire and all the pastoral West into his turmoil? You may go about any of the villages here, watch the daily doings of the inhabitants, and feel confident ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... sparklers, or I'm a doughhead." The police are the same all over the world; the original idea sticks to them, and truth in voice or presence is but sign of deeper cunning and villainy. "Anyhow, ye can't run around Washington like ye do in England, me cockney. Ye can't drive more'n a hundred miles an hour ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... the First Canadians. We were expected, and the English Tommies determined to give us right royal welcome and a hearty handshake. We had a reputation to keep up, for in England the Cockney Tommy and his brother "civvies" had named ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... the swarming buttons on jackets and trousers which used to distinguish the coster. But among the customers, whose number all but forbade our passage through the street, with the noise of their feet and voices, there were, far beyond counting, those short, stubbed girls and women as typically cockney still as the costers ever were. They were of a plinth-like bigness up and down, and their kind, plain, common faces were all topped with narrow-brimmed sailor-hats, mostly black. In their jargoning hardly an aspirate was in its right place, but they looked as if their hearts were, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... London —consequently know as little news as if I had been shut up in Bungey castle. Rumours there are of great bickerings and uneasiness; but I don't believe there will be any bloodshed of places, except Legge's, which nobody seems willing to take-I mean as a sinecure. His Majesty of Cockney is returned exceedingly well, but grown a little out of humour at finding that we are not so much pleased with all the Russians and Hessians that he has hired to recover the Ohio. We are an ungrateful people! Make a great many compliments for me to my Lady Ailesbury; I ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... fisherman's rugged life was spent on the restless ocean. Two months at sea and eight days ashore was the unvarying routine of Jim's life, summer and winter, all the year round. That is to say, about fifty days on shore out of the year, and three hundred and fifteen days on what the cockney greengrocer living next door to Jim styled the ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... sculpture, painting or window decoration of the Gothic period. Many names are cut in Gothic character on the same walls; a further proof that the vanity of man has ever sprouted in much the same way as now. The antiquary, because he has his own prejudices, perceives an abyss between the act of the Cockney tourist of to-day who carves his name upon an old tower or a menhir, and that of a man who five centuries ago, for no better reason than the other, left upon a guard-room wall a similar record of his passage. The man of the present is a vulgar defacer of interesting monuments, whereas ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... hard on us, Honor? Why are you so hard on me? I should say. For you are sweetness itself to that little curate of Drum, and he's about the poorest specimen of the Cockney ...
— Only an Irish Girl • Mrs. Hungerford
... 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 his 'uppishness' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... holidays; the fact that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pairs of tired eyes would have been freshened and gladdened by the sight of their rare gem-like beauty only made him prouder of his achievement. This young man was a cockney of the small shop-keeping class—a Philistine of the Philistines—hence there was no call to feel surprise at his self-glorification over such a matter. But what shall we say of that writer whose masterly works on English rural ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... of the little group who had been his companions for the time—the little Cockney with his incessant exuberance; the French-Canadian, picturesque of language and imagination; the one remaining Australian, vigorous of thought and forceful of temperament; the nurse, carrying Florence Nightingale's lamp through the blackness of war. He tried to say a little of what was bursting ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... engaged the rooms, and speedily arrived to take possession, bringing with him a spick-and-span new fishing-rod and basket. He did not know much about fishing, but he enjoyed himself just as thoroughly as if he did; and he laughed so good-humouredly at his own Cockney blunders, as he called them, that Thomas would have been quite angry had any one else presumed to indulge a smile at Mr Budge's expense. A pattern lodger in all respects was Mr Budge—deferential towards ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... the din of the dark streets came a crash of glass. With that mysterious suddenness of the Cockney mob, a rush was made in the right direction, a dingy office, next to the shop of the potted meat. The pane of glass was lying in splinters about the pavement. And the police already had their hands on a very tall young man, ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... time to think about the rules of the game; the automatic movements come all right, but in a clinch you've got to fight like a cat with tooth and claw, use your boots, your knee, or anything that comes handy. Perhaps that's why your lithe little Cockney is such a useful man with the bayonet. Now the Hun is a hefty beggar, and he isn't hampered by any ideas of playing the game, but he's as mechanical as a vacuum brake, and he's no good in ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... o' Bass, gov'nor," responded Millwaters promptly, dropping into colloquial Cockney speech. He turned to Perkwite and winked. "Well, an' wot abaht this 'ere bit o' business as I've come rahnd abaht, Mister?" he went on, nudging ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... Islington. The rooms he took were above a secondhand clothing shop kept by a drunken female named Leaver; a supposed widow who lived at the back of the shop with her two children, Lizzie, a bold-eyed girl of 17, who worked at a Clerkenwell clothing factory, and Joe, a typical Cockney boy of fourteen, who sold papers in the streets during the day and was fast qualifying for a thief at night when Crewe went ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... This is Oliver a little sternly from the upper berth. "That was your bath that came in a minute ago and said something in Cockney. At least I think it was—mine's voice is a good deal more like one of Peter's butlers—" "But, Ollie, ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... did not want their assistance; he had fixed on a person to take charge of his measure in the House of Commons. This person was a member who was not connected with the government, and who neither had, nor deserved to have, the ear of the House, a noisy, purse-proud, illiterate demagogue, whose Cockney English and scraps of mispronounced Latin were the jest of the newspapers, Alderman Beckford. It may well be supposed that these strange proceedings produced a ferment through the whole political world. The city was in commotion. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... climax; it needs only the cockney accent to make the thing complete," she said. "When I was last in London, one heard that silly jingle everywhere. I suppose it's a ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... said, plucking impatiently at her demure sleeve, and even in my semi-consciousness I smiled at the sound of the words from his cockney lips. ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman |
