The Whisper in the Wood

Anon

‘The Whisper in the Wood’ was published in 1880 in All the Year Round , a journal founded and edited by Charles Dickens and then run by his son Charles Dickens Junior following the death of the elder Dickens in 1870. Stories and articles were published anonymously in All the Year Round , though the remarkable purchase of Dickens’ own annotated set of the journal from a second-hand bookshop in Wrexham in 2015 has revealed the authors of many of the journal’s earlier pieces. The author of the later ‘The Whisper in the Wood’ is likely to remain unknown, however.

The story’s main drama takes place in Wistman’s Wood in Dartmoor, one of England’s highest oakwoods, and a fragment of ancient forest often characterised as a surviving druid grove. The wood is remarkable for the twisted and stunted trees, rooted beneath the granite boulders and covered with a thick skin of moss. You could be forgiven for thinking it an artist’s impression of a fantasy landscape, or the carefully designed set of a horror film. The Victorian geographer Samuel Rowe asked in his A Perambulation of the Forest of Dartmoor (1848) whether the imagination could conceive “a place more congenial to the sights and sounds of dark and blood-stained rites, than this dreary, narrow, rock-strewn glen?” It is a place, Rowe continues, with an “evil reputation among the country people, as abounding with noxious reptiles” and a likely setting for “idolatrous orgies”. The author of ‘The Whisper in the Wood’ is probably aware of Rowe’s book, and certainly of the literary potential of Wistman’s Wood. The protagonist of the early part of the story, Ronald Morris, reflects in the opening paragraphs that the wood “promises well as the background to a story”. ‘The Whisper in the Wood’ is a somewhat over-the-top gothic chiller, and the forest at its centre is an archetypal, but evocative weird wood: menacing and alluring in equal measure with bleak secrets among its dense foliage.