Language & Literature. (Abstracts-2003 Annual Meetings)‪.‬

"A Great Moral Discipline": Gardens in Dickens. Natalie B. Cole, Oakland University, English Department, Rochester, MI 48309-4401 Writing in the year of Dickens's death, C. D. Warner calls gardening "a great moral discipline" for all practitioners. This essay discusses the various moral and narrative uses to which Charles Dickens puts the garden, from his early essays in Sketches by Boz in the 1830s, to his late essays in the 1860s from The Uncommercial Traveller. Of special interest are the differences in how Dickens represents the garden space in London in comparison to the garden spaces in the English countryside in both his essays and selected novels.