"Costermonger" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... praying 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 starry ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... alludes. It neither was, nor could be conceived, as other than 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. The power of ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... writ and give it to an officer, who will bring her back. More than this, when the officer has returned the woman, the loving husband has the legal right to "reprove" her. Just what reprove means the courts have not yet determined; for, in a recent decision, when a costermonger admitted having given his lady "a taste of the cat," the prisoner was discharged on the ground that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... 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, ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... not a costermonger, Mr Toogood,—though more wretched perhaps than any costermonger now in existence. It is my lot to have to endure the sufferings of poverty, and at the same time not to be exempt from those feelings ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... sold 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... 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 pressure on the ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... 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 more incongruous still ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... whether his psychology is correct. If it is, then he has indeed made an important discovery. To use a very homely illustration: a carrot dangled from the end of a stick before a donkey's nose makes no mechanical difference in the problem of traction presented by the costermonger's barrow. If anything, it adds to the weight to be drawn. But if the sight of it cheers, heartens, and inspires the donkey, helping him to overcome those fits of lethargy so characteristic of his race, then the ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... 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
... the Costermonger Songs seems to me a significant phenomenon. While no humane person would deny to the itinerant vendor of comestibles that sympathy which is accorded to the joys and sorrows of his more refined fellow-creatures, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 16, 1892 • Various
... manacled and shamed by illegitimacy. He 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
... them on rods—and then they are 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 so ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... deal of style and vulgar "side" is put on; where the house-servants are in livery; the dinner is served on silver plates, in empty mimicry of a ducal mansion; where all travelling sprigs of nobility are welcomed by the proprietor (who was probably a costermonger before his emigration) to whom he is glad to introduce his daughter with the scarcely-veiled recommendation that she has fifty thousand to carry in her hand to the right man, provided he has good English blue blood in his veins and none of the ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... a tone which would have been perfect if we had been acting a costermonger and his wife. "Are you going to make Clinton ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... morning of my leaving the inn he learned that a costermonger had found a young woman, sick and bewildered, who, having lost her way, was taken by him to a public-house. He learned the man's name and home. Finding him, the desired information was given. Rapidly ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... 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
... back into the road to look up at the house, thereby imperilling his life amid the traffic. A costermonger taking cabbages from the Borough Market to Limehouse gave the captain a little piece of his mind in the choicest terms then current in his daily intercourse with man, and received in turn winged words of such a forcible and original nature as to send ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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
... 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
... suffer such separation." Quoth he, "I shall not long be separated from thee;" and so saying he fared forth from her and disappeared for the space of an hour, after which he returned home softly walking and hid himself in a place where none could see him. Now after the space of two hours behold, a Costermonger[FN399] came into the house and she met him and salam'd to him and said, "What hast thou brought for me?" "Two lengths of sugar-cane," said he, and said she, "Set them down in a corner of the room." Then he asked her, "Whither is thy husband ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... kitchen, knife in hand, with the corners of his mouth out of sight round his broad cheeks. His ample front was decked with a blue apron, suspended from his shoulders, and confined round the convexity of his waist by an old strap which no respectable costermonger would have used as harness. The soup served was by courtesy called soupe maigre, but it was in fact soupe maigre diluted by many homoeopathic myriads, and the Brother showed much curiosity as to my opinion of its taste—a curiosity which I could not satisfy ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... a regular supply of naphtha gas. When the lamp does not burn very well, you will often see the man poking it with a pin. The carbon given off from the naphtha is very disposed to choke up the little hole through which the naphtha runs into the cup, and the costermonger pushes a pin into the little hole to allow the free passage of the naphtha. That, then, is the mechanism of this beautiful lamp of the Whitechapel ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy
... 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 to a truck with a flat ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... lord; your ill angel is light; but I hope he that looks upon me will take me without weighing: and yet, in some respects, I grant, I cannot go: I cannot tell. Virtue is of so little regard in these costermonger times that true valour is turned bear-herd; pregnancy is made a tapster, and hath his quick wit wasted in giving reckonings: all the other gifts appertinent to man, as the malice of this age shapes them, are not worth a gooseberry. ...
— King Henry IV, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Chiswick edition]
... 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 ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... 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 ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... characteristic of your country and of your generation at this moment. What a yearning, what an expectation, amid infinite falsehoods and confusions, of some nobler, more chivalrous, more godlike state! Your very costermonger trolls out his belief that "there's a good time coming," and the hearts of gamins, as well as millenarians, answer, "True!" Is not that a clashing among the dry bones? And as for flesh, what new materials are springing up among you every month, spiritual and physical, for a state such as ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... observation of the costermonger leaning over his barrow near the Assize Court when one morning Sir Henry was ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... instrument are within hearing. The barrel-organ, again, is strong in the support of servants, especially nurses, who find that the music diverts babies. The rest of the day is made hideous by the awful notes of every species of unintelligible and uncalled for costermonger, from him who (apparently) bellows "Annie Erskine," to her who cries, "All a-blowing and a-growing." There are miscreants who want to buy bones, to sell ferns, to sell images, wicker- chairs, and other inutilities, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... 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 move along, helter-skelter, ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... Parliament had passed what is known as Martin's Act (1822), which was the first step taken by this or any other country for the protection of animals. In Scene 7 of Sketches by Boz there is a mention of 'the renowned Mr. Martin, of costermonger notoriety.' The reference to the New Police Act reminds us that the London police force was remodelled by Mr. (afterwards Sir Robert) Peel in 1829. Hence the date of the song will be within a year or two ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... he hooks in his principal for a great deal more employment in the justice line than the honest squire had ever bargained for; so that no apple-wife within the circuit of ten miles can settle her account with a costermonger without an audience of the reluctant Justice and his alert clerk, Mr. Joseph Jobson. But the most ridiculous scenes occur when affairs come before him, like our business of to-day, having any colouring of politics. Mr. Joseph Jobson (for which, no doubt, he has his ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... trader, dealer, monger, chandler, salesman; changer; regrater^; shopkeeper, shopman^; tradesman, tradespeople, tradesfolk. retailer; chapman, hawker, huckster, higgler^; pedlar, colporteur, cadger, Autolycus^; sutler^, vivandiere^; costerman^, costermonger^; tallyman; camelot; faker; vintner. money broker, money changer, money lender; cambist^, usurer, moneyer^, banker. jobber; broker &c (agent) 758; buyer &c 795; seller &c 796; bear, bull. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... dressed, or a dinner ill cooked because he is (presumably) ignorant of the mysteries of the arts of tailoring and cooking? Moreover, some of us, perhaps even Mr Beerbohm, know a good deal about the technique of acting, even if we could not "make-up" Mr Bourchier to look like a costermonger. The actor must be very vain in his conceit who has not had valuable hints concerning his acting from the critics, unless he be one of those who, unlike Mr Bourchier, never read notices—yet often complain of an unfavourable one. The article called "Signor Borza on the ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... was rationed all over the city. No one is to have more than 300 grammes per diem; children only 150. I recommend anyone who has lived too high to try this regime for a week. It will do him good. No costermonger's donkey is so overloaded as the stomachs of most rich people. The Government on December 12 solemnly announced that the bread never would be rationed. This measure, therefore, looks to me very much like the beginning of the end. A perquisition is also being made in search ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... don't understand 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
... of churches were ringing, and the great cathedral bells boomed in thrilling monotony over the peaceful city. Here and there in the shabby yet renowned streets, horsemen moved along; now and then the costermonger raised his cry of fresh fruit, flowers, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... public-houses with groups of women outside drinking and gossiping, all wearing the black shawls which are as emblematic of the lower class London woman as a chasuble to a priest, or a blue tattooed upper lip to a high-caste Maori beauty. A costermonger hawked frozen rabbits from a donkey-cart, with a pallid woman following behind to drive away the mangy cats which quarrelled in the road for the oozing blood which dripped from the cart's tail. An Italian woman, swarthy, squat, and intolerably dirty, ground ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... 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 trip through ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the boat's approach in a silence broken only once by a long whimper from Ally Bazan. "An' it was a-workin' out as lovely as Billy-oh," he said, "till that syme underbred costermonger's swipe remembered he was Methody—an' him who, only a few d'ys back, went raound s'yin' 'scrag the "Boomskys"!' A couple o' thousand pounds gone as quick as look at it. Oh, I eyn't never goin' to ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... 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 |
