Suspended in Time: Thomas Hardy and the Original Cliffhanger

A serialized novel written by Thomas Hardy leaves a character hanging off a cliff for a month - and inspires the coining of the term "cliffhanger."

A man and a woman are walking along the seacliffs of Wessex. An updraft seizes the man’s hat. As he walks down the slope toward the cliff’s edge to recover it, he disappears from view. When the woman follows to see where he is, she finds that he is on a steep incline at the cliff’s edge and can’t clamber up over the slippery rock, although his foot is resting on an outcropping that is arresting a further slide down the rock face. She reaches over to give him her hand, but her effort to save him fails. The outcropping rock comes loose from the surrounding strata and falls away into the water. The man slides further down and is left holding onto the cliff with his hands, his feet dangling in empty space. “[S]even hundred feet above the water [the cliff] overhung…. What gave an added terror to its height was its blackness…. Moreover it seemed to float off into the atmosphere, and inspire terror …” As the woman runs away to find help, the man finds himself “in the presence of a personalized loneliness.”¹

William Trost Richards, Tintagel on the Cornish Coast (1879). The ruins of Tintagel Castle, discussed below, are located about nine miles away from Beeny Cliff, the cliff that is thought to have inspired the cliffhanger in Hardy’s story.

The chapter ends there. So did the February 1873 issue of Tinsley's Magazine. Because this story – the novel A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy – was being published in Tinsley’s on an installment basis, readers had to wait a month to find out whether the man, Henry Knight, made it off the cliff alive, and if so, how.

Thomas Hardy was born 185 years ago on June 2, 1840, and this post is in honor of his birthday. Hardy did not refer to his story as a “cliffhanger.” Others, no doubt inspired by Hardy’s story, coined the term. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest use of that term (in the two-word form “cliff hanger”) occurred in 1931, almost 60 years after Hardy left Knight dangling in oblivion for a month. Still, where else could the term have come from?

Serial Suspense Before Hardy’s Cliffhanger

Hardy was not the first to end a portion of a periodic or serial literary work with a suspenseful event that would keep the reader coming back to find out the fate of the characters. The medieval Middle Eastern folktale collection One Thousand and One Nights relies on a gruesome framing story in which a king, Shahryar, weds, beds, and then kills a new virgin every night until the clever Scheherazade, volunteering to be his next victim, tells him a story during the night that stops at dawn before the denouement – and so Shahryar must keep her alive until the next night, when she resolves the suspense but then starts a new story. After 1001 nights of this, Shahryar agrees to alter his murderous marital practice, and Scheherazade wins the dubious prize of a lifetime with Shahryar.

Edmund Dulac, illustration from Stories from The Arabian Nights (Laurence Housman) (1907).

Victorian authors writing before Hardy also used the periodical format to create suspense and ensure continued attention as their novels were released over extended periods of time. In January, 1838, readers of Oliver Twist read a harrowing account of Oliver’s being shot after the robber Bill Sikes pushed him through a window to gain entry to a house:

[A] light appeared—a vision of two terrified half-dressed men at the top of the stairs swam before his eyes—a flash—a loud noise—a smoke—a crash somewhere, but where he knew not,—and he staggered back…. Then came the loud ringing of a bell, mingled with the noise of fire-arms, and the shouts of men, and the sensation of being carried over uneven ground at a rapid pace. And then, the noises grew confused in the distance; and a cold deadly feeling crept over the boy’s heart; and he saw or heard no more.²

That was how the installment ended in the January 1838 issue of Bentley’s Miscellany. Dickens kept readers in suspense for two months, because the February serial number dealt with the doings of the corrupt workhouse beadle and the discovery by Fagin and his gang that the attempted robbery had failed. It wasn’t until March that Dickens’s readers could sigh with relief over Oliver’s survival.

James Mahoney, “Sikes, with Oliver's hand still in his, softly approached the low porch,“ illustration for Oliver Twist ch. 21 (Household Ed., 1871). This shows Sikes pulling Oliver along in the darkness as Sikes prepares to break into the house. Illustration from The Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery, an invaluable resource available here.

Hardy’s Early Experimentation with the Romance Novel

But enough about Dickens for a post on Hardy. Hardy is famous for beautifully written tragedies in the realist tradition such as Jude the Obscure and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Early in his career, though, he experimented with other forms, and his novels were not (always) bleak. His first published novel, Desperate Remedies, is sensation fiction in the Wilkie Collins tradition, featuring murder, bigamy, and impersonation, and one of the most chilling wedding scenes in all of Victorian fiction. And it has a happy ending, as does his second novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, which is very much within Hardy’s usual realist approach.

A Pair of Blue Eyes was Hardy’s third novel, and the first published under his own name. Hardy classified this novel as among his “Romances and Fantasies.” Its language confirms this categorization: it contains verbal echoes of chivalric legends in the names of its characters and in its settings. The young woman who bravely attempts to rescue her lover from the cliff is Elfride Swancourt. Elfride is a name with a decidedly medieval ring, while Swancourt has an Arthurian flavor: Sir Percival leaves the court of King Arthur to undertake his quest for the Holy Grail in remorse for killing a swan. Elfride’s cliff-hanging lover is named Knight. The cliff from which Knight hangs is thought to be Beeny Cliff, in north Cornwall, very near to the ruins of Tintagel Castle – the supposed place of conception of King Arthur and the site of events in the legend of Tristan and Iseult. Significant scenes in A Pair of Blue Eyes occur at an ancient stone church, which is reminiscent of the chapels that recur in Arthurian legend as places of trial, or of spiritual revelations.

Hardy described the setting of the novel as

the region of dream and mystery. The ghostly birds, the pall-like sea, the frothy wind, the eternal soliloquy of the waters, the bloom of dark purple cast, that seems to exhale from the shoreward precipices, in themselves lend to the scene an atmosphere like the twilight of a night vision.³

The otherworldly sensibility of the novel carries through in its descriptions of Elfride as she is seen by her two competing lovers, Henry Knight and his younger rival Stephen Smith. Here is Smith’s vision of Elfride as he watches her playing the piano:

[A] young woman in a pale gray silk dress with trimmings of swan’s-down … the cool colour contrasting admirably with the warm bloom of her neck and face. The furthermost candle on the piano comes immediately in a line with her head, and half invisible itself, forms the accidentally frizzled hair into a nebulous haze of light, surrounding her crown like an aureola.⁴

And Knight’s vision:

The sun was within ten degrees of the horizon, and its warm light flooded her face and heightened the bright rose colour of her cheeks …. The ends of her hanging hair softly dragged themselves backwards and forwards upon her shoulder as each faint breeze thrust against or relinquished it. Fringes and ribbons of her dress, moved by the same breeze, licked like tongues upon the parts around them, and fluttering forward from shady folds caught likewise their share of the lustrous orange glow.⁵

James Abbott Pasquier, Elfride's Attempt to Help Knight (1873). This is Elfride’s attempt to help Knight, who slips down even further into the abyss.

The Sweep of Time

But the novel complicates its romantic themes in the way that it curves time. Sometimes Hardy draws out momentary events or scenes (as in the images of Elfride) so that time almost stops. The serialization itself had this effect for readers, who were forced to hang from the cliff with Knight for a month.

Other aspects of the story have almost the opposite effect. In the March, 1873 issue of Tinsley’s, readers found Knight still dangling, the stream of his consciousness focused intently, not on his love for Elfride, but on the vast sweep of time visible in the cliff-face:

[O]pposite Knight’s eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him…. Separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death…. The creature represented but a low type of animal existence, for never in their vernal years had the plains indicated by those numberless slaty layers been traversed by an intelligence worthy of the name. Zoophytes, mollusca, shell-fish, were the highest developments of those ancient dates. The immense lapses of time each formation represented had known nothing of the dignity of man…. He was to be with the small in his death…. Time closed up like a fan before him.⁶

This is the “personalized loneliness” with which Hardy closed the previous number. The thoughts of a man facing probable death diminish romance to a tiny glimmering in the immensity of geologic time. Tintagel castle is a ruin; the old churches Elfride knows in her young womanhood are being torn down. Romance and legend yield to the understanding that we are all “small in [our] death.”

Novels Discussed (not merely mentioned) in This Post

Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873). I’m happy that I managed to discuss the cliffhanger featured in this novel without disclosing the resolution. Read it and find out! I’ve discussed only a tiny fraction of the plot elements, themes, and issues that emerge from this book: the efficacy of curses; class conflict in courtship; the sexual double standard; the impact of railroads; the treachery of earrings.

Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies (1871). This first published novel of Hardy’s centers on the fate of Cytherea Graye, a young woman who becomes the paid companion of a mysterious older woman, Miss Aldclyffe. Although Cytherea loves another man, she is deceived into marrying the villain Aeneas Manston in the memorable wedding scene I mentioned above. The novel features bigamy, imposture, and murder: it’s a very compelling book.

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838). I’m not sure why I keep coming back to this particular work, but I discussed the antisemitic portrayal of the novel’s criminal mastermind Fagin in this post, and the moralism of the story in this post. I hope you’ll read those.

I am indebted to Gwen Fletcher for the suggestion to discuss Arthurian legend.

1. Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), ch. 21. “Wessex” is the imaginary world Hardy created from southwest England.

2. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838), ch. 22.

3. A Pair of Blue Eyes, Preface.

4. Id. ch. 3.

5. Id. ch. 17.

6. Id. ch. 22.