How hit period romance Bridgerton makes history

NEW YORK – When the first season of the Netflix series Bridgerton premiered on Christmas Day, Amanda Vickery sat at home with her three daughters and watched every episode. This was in 2020, in the midst of England’s lockdown, and she remembers thinking, “Thank goodness for this escape.”

That she could lose herself that way is a particular compliment to Bridgerton, a flowered fantasy adapted from the Regency-set romance novels of Julia Quinn. Vickery, a professor at Queen Mary, University of London, is a historian. And Bridgerton, a show in which empowered women swoon to orchestral versions of Ariana Grande’s songs, takes a rather liberal approach to history.

Watching at home, Vickery did not imagine she would work on Bridgerton, but for this third season, the second instalment of which arrived on June 13, she served as its historical consultant. She succeeded her friend and colleague Hannah Greig, a professor emerita at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Does a show that repurposes Coldplay’s song Yellow as a wedding march really require historians? Yes. Several.

“We’re aware that Bridgerton isn’t aiming for documentary accuracy,” Vickery said during a recent video call, with Greig in an adjoining window. “It is a fantasy, but it’s a fantasy that’s grounded in an understanding of period.”

Her role, as she sees it, is to point out potential anachronisms, and then let the writers and directors decide from there.

Greig had a slightly different formulation. “You are the on-call geek, the walking encyclopaedia,” she said. But she and Vickery share a motto of sorts: The show makes choices, not mistakes.

“When they do depart from the absolute letter of history, it’s done knowingly and for a reason,” Vickery said. “It’s intentional.”

The Regency period is generally understood as spanning the years from the end of the 18th century to the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837, a period coterminous with Jane Austen’s work and a popular setting for romance novels. Although the Bridgerton writers are broadly aware of the manners and customs of the period, there is an assistant in the writers’ room charged with googling questions (Were there hot air balloons in this period? Yes.) and offering historical tidbits.

There is also a dialogue consultant, John Mullan, another University College London professor. Mullan reviews each script and makes suggestions, helping – as Season 3 showrunner Jess Brownell put it – to “Regency-ify” the speech.

Brownell accepts nearly all of his notes, except when it would take 10 Regency words to replace one modern one. “In that case,” she said, “it’s just not worth it.”

Greig and Vickery also review the scripts. Sometimes they are asked to consult on larger questions, such as: What was the social status of a widow in this period? The goal, Vickery said, is not to be “a schoolmistress, telling them off”, but instead to give the creative team whatever information they require and offer suggestions that might free them from a plot hole.

Of course, some anachronisms are deliberate. In this Regency, it is forever springtime, and it very rarely rains. As Bridgerton is a progressive fantasy, it allows women significant autonomy and includes people of colour within the highest echelons of English society.

“It’s a way of evening out the scales for how much erasure there has been of people of colour in Regency times in television and in films,” Brownell said.

Most notably, Bridgerton cast Golda Rosheuvel, a biracial actress, as Queen Charlotte. Although at least one historian has posited the real Queen Charlotte as multiracial, that theory has found little acceptance. In the queen’s time, Vickery noted, Charlotte was perceived as very German and very dull.

“Thankfully, this Queen Charlotte is much more exciting,” Vickery said. So exciting that she inspired a 2023 spin-off series, Queen Charlotte, which departs more enthusiastically from the historical record.

Otherwise, and excepting some pointed omissions, Bridgerton hews largely to history. The balls were really extravagant, and the sex was potentially just as hot. (The source for this: delightful 18th-century erotica.) Even Queen Charlotte’s swan wig has a precedent.

Still, there are dozens of online threads devoted to the ways in which Bridgerton diverges from the real Regency – the hairstyles, the fashions, the smoking. And there are more substantive online arguments, discussions about what it means to diversify the aristocracy retrospectively without consideration of the real-world racism and colonialism of the time.

The show also ignores the political changes taking place elsewhere (the Napoleonic Wars are barely mentioned) and the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution at home.

“That would be a very, very different show,” Vickery said. “That’s just not what Bridgerton is trying to do. It’s really about female pleasure. Probably, Bridgerton thinks more about female pleasure than a lot of aristocratic men did.”

Vickery and Greig said that, as viewers, they never experience the discomfort of an apparent anachronism. Mostly because they know to expect it. And they believe that deliberate anachronisms can spark productive conversations among both historians and laypeople.

“We are asked many more questions now about what is the real history of race, what is the real history of a relationship between England and South Asia,” Greig said. “It opens up the conversation in a way that other period dramas might not.”

Vickery said consulting on the show has enriched her work as a historian. The questions of fashion and etiquette that the writers ask often border issues of power, reputation and risk. And she described her visits to the set in vivid terms. “It’s astounding,” she said. “It’s like seeing an army in the field. But you’re then asked if you’ve any notes.”

Often, they do, and often, those notes are then incorporated, a gift to any academic.

“Bridgerton is an absolute joy,” Greig said. “It’s a fiction. It’s a fantasy. It’s a way of asking ourselves to think differently about the past, and that’s one of its great pleasures.” NYTIMES