"Costermonger" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... argue away. "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
... Ghorawalla fair play. We artificialise him, dress him according to our tastes, conform him to our notions, cramp his ingenuity, and quench his affections. The Ghorawalla in his native state is no more like our domesticated Pandoo than the wild ass of Cutch is like the costermonger's moke. We will have him like our own saddlery, plain and businesslike, but he is by nature like his national horse gear, ornamental, and if you let him alone, will effloresce in a red fez cap, with tassel, and a waistcoat of green ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... 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 ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... afternoon, while I was at home, a costermonger came to the door with walnuts. The girl answered the bell, and presently I saw the coster and his cart go past the dining-room window. I don't know why it was, or how it was, but a suspicion came over me. ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... a conference between four policemen, the costermonger, and, by that time, Mr. Travers—was to draw the animal off the street and into the square. Sara Lee stuck close by. So, naturally, did Henri. And when the hopeless condition of Nellie, as they learned she was named, became increasingly evident, ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... to fix that river? Look! There's The Mussuck head of goodness knows what. He is a power in the land, though he does eat like a costermonger. There's Colonel Blone, and General Grucher, and Sir Dugald Delane, and Sir Henry Haughton, and Mr. Jellalatty. All Heads of Departments, and ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... putting them in the way of honest work, at teaching their children, at protecting them with a perfect courage and chivalry against oppression and wrong. He instinctively appealed in fact to their higher nature, and such an appeal seldom remains unanswered. In the roughest costermonger there is a vein of real nobleness, often even of poetry, in which lies the whole chance of his rising to a better life. I remember, as an instance of the way in which such a vein can be touched, the visit of a lady, well known for her work in the poorer districts of London, to a low alley ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... 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
... 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 ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... does not burn very well, you will often see the man poking it with a pin. The carbon given off from the naphtha is very disposed to choke up the little hole through which the naphtha runs into the cup, and the costermonger pushes a pin into the little hole to allow the free passage of the naphtha. That, then, is the mechanism of this beautiful lamp of the Whitechapel traders, known as ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy
... has told 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 Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... 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 will ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... the boat's approach in a silence broken only once by a long whimper from Ally Bazan. "An' it was a-workin' out as lovely as Billy-oh," he said, "till that syme underbred costermonger's swipe remembered he was Methody—an' him who, only a few d'ys back, went raound s'yin' 'scrag the "Boomskys"!' A couple o' thousand pounds gone as quick as look at it. Oh, I eyn't never ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... 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 or eight miles, although no two ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... gowns, when they perceived the carriage approaching; and considering, of course, that the visit of the Park people was intended for them, dashed into the rectory to change their clothes, leaving Rowkins, the costermonger, in the very midst of the negotiation about the three mackerel. Mamma got that new bonnet out of the bandbox; Lizzy and Liddy skipped up to their bedroom, and brought out those dresses which they wore at the dejeuner at the Newcome Athenaeum, when Lord Leveret came down to lecture; ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... out of substantives, if he could. "He being thus lorded," i. e. ennobled "with what my revenue yielded," is surely a far superior expression to "being thus loaded,"—as if the poet were speaking of a costermonger's donkey! ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... delightful men and women whom you are certain to meet at an English country house there is generally one guest who is supposed to be preternaturally clever and amusing—"so very droll, don't you know." He recites things, tells stories in costermonger dialect, and mimics public characters. He is a type of a class, and I take him to be one of the elementary forms of animal life, like the acalephae. His presence is capable of adding a gloom to an undertaker's establishment. The last time I fell in with him was on a coaching ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... hardly a shred of covering left; they made him kneel, then made him stand up, blindfolded him then uncovered his eyes; finally they put an end to his long agony by shooting him, and flung the body into a costermonger's cart close to the gate. Several priests had got out of the prison of La Roquette. The Abbe Surat, on passing over a barricade, was so imprudent as to state who he was, and showed some articles of value he had about him. He had got as far as about the middle of the Boulevard du Prince ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... his "pals" in prison, under an assumed name, that he had been to the Prisoners' Aid Society, and had obtained as much of his gratuity as he could, to buy a barrow and some fruit, as he meant to turn costermonger. He added, however, that he did not like fruit-selling, and returned to his old trade of "gunsmith," gunning being the slang term for thieving, or going on the cross. The real fact was, that he never intended anything else than ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... "Recent events call for a full discussion 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 |
