A scheme to add credibility to Bridgerton.

Bridgerton Season 3 is being handed to us four episodes at a time. We’ve now consumed our four and have leisure to reflect.

There was a very disconcerting moment when Eloise remarks that she greatly enjoyed Emma by Jane Austen – recently published. It’s disconcerting not because she enjoys the book, a book that everyone can and should enjoy, but because the publication of Emma in December 1815 was a real event that occurred in the real world. Every reference to a real event lodged in the historical record threatens the wobbly integrity of the Bridgerton universe. Once you start hearing people talk about Jane Austen, you start to wonder why nobody has ever once mentioned Napoleon and why the Battle of Waterloo passed by without anyone in high society registering it? Whenever this series references reality, it threatens to dissolve. There’s a Proustian time travel romance called Somewhere in Time (1980) in which a character played by Christopher Reeve who has dreamed his way back to 1912 accidentally finds a 1970s coin in his pocket and his world disintegrates. I’m always waiting for something like this to happen in Bridgerton.

Bridgerton succeeds when it is experienced as a 21st century cosplay fantasy. There happens to be a city called London and there happens to be a queen called Charlotte. Any resemblance to any real city called London or any real queen called Charlotte should be regarded as co-incidental. Last night they put Hampton Court Palace in the middle of Mayfair. Bravo!

However, a fantasy world has a special responsibility to observe a certain internal logic. If you compare the Bridgerton universe with a far more plausible fantasy land such as Middle Earth, you realise the need to make your dream world self-sustaining. When Frodo and Sam survey the desolation of Mordor, they wonder how all these orcs are possibly fed? And Tolkien immediately tells us.

Movies and TV shows set prior to 1900 are sometimes accused of making women inappropriately feisty, engaged in political struggles that really would not have involved them. One major difference (there are countless major differences) between the Bridgerton Regency world and the actual Regency world is that in the actual Regency period aristocratic ladies were obsessed with politics. They defined themselves as Whig or Tory. They took an active interest in elections and helped organise campaigns. They wrote anxious letters reflecting on the state of Europe. By contrast, even Eloise Bridgerton is strikingly uninterested in power politics.

But then… no man is interested in politics either. In the Bridgerton universe there is no parliament, no Prime Minister, no elections, and no political causes. There is no military – other than a few decorative and mute mannequins the Queen keeps as pets. There is no war and no criminal justice system. There is no mention of who tills the soil and who it is hews coal out of the ground. There is no system of revenue. There is no labour theory of value. There is no actual governance of any kind. And there is no Frodo and Sam wondering how everybody is to be fed.

Morlocks.

Bridgerton needs Morlocks if it is to achieve the degree of plausibility needed to compel sympathy and attention over however many seasons it has left. Morlocks will complete the Bridgerton universe by giving it a rational economy and therefore a proper autonomy.

If you introduce Morlocks to Bridgerton everything will feel more real. And the dialogue will achieve greater urgency as well.

“Will you both be joining us at Lady Giraffe’s ball tomorrow night?”
“I fear not, Cressida Cowper is to be sacrificed to the Morlocks at sunset. I must come alone.”
“Oh what a pity.”
“A pity indeed. But let us not forget that without the flesh-eating denizens of the darkness, our entire Eloi society would collapse.”
“Assuredly. They do toil so very hard. It seems only fair that they get to eat a few of us from time to time.”

“Precisely… no Morlocks, no ton!”

H.G. Wells and Walter Benjamin rewrite Bridgerton and make it stronger than ever.