(Roughly) Daily

From Dayten Rose, a brief history of the spoiler alert…

Serialized fiction emerged in the middle of the 19th century, in which writers could publish whole novels in weekly installments. Suddenly writers could string their audience along to a thrilling conclusion. They didn’t even need to have answers to the questions they were asking.

Wilkie Collins published his 1859 mystery The Woman in White over ten months in his friend Charles Dickens’ periodical. In a scene familiar to anyone who followed Breaking Bad as it aired, the sensation around Collins’ serial was such that at least one treasury chancellor cleared his social calendar to catch up.

When Collins finished the story and prepared for its release as a finished three-volume set, it occurred to him that anyone could come along and ruin the suspense. Namely, he worried about critics. What if they gave away the ending? What if, in failing to tell the whole story, they made him look bad?

He wrote to reviewers in the preface of the set asking to keep plot details to a minimum. Literary historian James Aaron Green identifies at least one reviewer who listened, writing:

“[we hope] there is no objection to an occasional hint, a dark allusion … to this mystery of mysteries, the [plot of] the Woman in White.”

Or, to detranslate from the magniloquent prolixity of Victorian prose: “Spoiler alert.”…

Preserving suspense: “███████ Alert,” from @DaytenRose in @readtedium, the wonderful newsletter by @ShortFormErnie.

* Promo blurb for the 1955 psychological thriller Les Diabolique

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As we keep a secret, we might send chilling birthday greetings to George Romero; he was born on this date in 1940. A  filmmaker, writer, editor and actor who worked broadly in movies and television, he is best remembered for his Night of the Living Dead series of films about an imagined zombie apocalypse, which began with the 1968 film of the same name. Though he wasn’t the first creator of a Zombie film (see, e.g., I Walked with a Zombie), he is widely considered the “Father of the Zombie Film.”

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