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Cliffhanger

Plot device used in fiction

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Through Middle Ages

Lab · Class 11Nomadic Medieval

Serialized narratives may conclude with textual cues such as "To Be Continued" or "The End?", and in serialized television, subsequent episodes frequently utilize a recap sequence.

Cliffhangers were used as literary devices in several works of the Middle Ages with One Thousand and One Nights ending on a cliffhanger each night. Cliffhangers appeared as an element of the Victorian era serial novel that emerged in the 1840s, with many associating the form with Charles Dickens, a pioneer of the serial publication of narrative fiction. Following the enormous success of Dickens, by the 1860s cliffhanger endings had become a staple part of the sensation serials.

History

Cliffhangers were used as literary devices in several works of the Middle Ages. The Arabic literary work One Thousand and One Nights involves Scheherazade narrating a series of stories to King Shahryār for 1,001 nights, with each night ending on a cliffhanger in order to save herself from execution. Some medieval Chinese ballads like the Liu chih-yuan chu-kung-tiao ended each chapter on a cliffhanger to keep the audience in suspense.

The Scottish comic magazine The Glasgow Looking Glass, founded by English artist William Heath, pioneered the use of the phrase 'To Be Continued' in its serials in 1825.

Victorian serials

Cliffhangers became prominent with the serial publication of narrative fiction, pioneered by Charles Dickens. Printed episodically in magazines, Dickens's cliffhangers triggered desperation in his readers. Writing in the New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum captured the anticipation of those waiting for the next installment of Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop:

In 1841, Dickens fanboys rioted on the dock of New York Harbor, as they waited for a British ship carrying the next installment, screaming, "Is little Nell dead?"

On Dickens' instalment format and cliffhangers—first seen with The Pickwick Papers in 1836—Leslie Howsam in The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (2015) writes, "It inspired a narrative that Dickens would explore and develop throughout his career. The instalments would typically culminate at a point in the plot that created reader anticipation and thus reader demand."

With each new instalment widely anticipated with its cliffhanger ending, Dickens' audience was enormous; his instalment format was also much more affordable and accessible to the masses, with the audience more evenly distributed across income levels than previous. The popularity of Dickens's serial publications saw the cliffhanger become a staple part of the sensation serials by the 1860s. His influence is also seen in television soap operas and film series, with The Guardian stating "the DNA of Dickens's busy, episodic storytelling, delivered in instalments and rife with cliffhangers and diversions, is traceable in everything."

Etymology

The term "cliff-hanger" is defined by The Oxford English Dictionary as “a serial film in which each episode ends in a desperate situation; hence, any story, play, etc., in which suspense is a main concern.” It records the first use of the term in 1936.

Some have therefore mistakenly considered its origins to have originated with the serialised version of Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes (which was published in Tinsley's Magazine between September 1872 and July 1873) in which Henry Knight, one of the protagonists, is left hanging off a cliff.

In his book of essays, The Art of Fiction, David Lodge refers to this moment in Hardy's novel as "a classic scene of suspense that was, as far as I know, entirely invented. The word [suspense] derives from the Latin word meaning 'to hang', and there could hardly be a situation more productive of suspense than of a man clinging by his finger-tips to the face of a cliff unable to climb to safety - hence the generic term, 'cliff-hanger'". Lodge does not claim this is the origin of the term; just that Hardy presents a literal rendering of it in prose.

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