Bridgerton: The Real-Life Lady Whistledowns of Regency-Era England

The premise of Shonda Rhimes’s Bridgerton can roughly be reduced to this: a group of genetically blessed, Regency-era aristocrats search for love (or lust) during the London social season. But wait, there’s scandal afoot! An anonymous newsletter is hellbent on chronicling all their misdeeds!

When the trailer first came out in mid-December, some compared it to an old-timey Gossip Girl. And sure, there are some (albeit anachronistic) similarities. Each has an anonymous narrator, to start: Lady Whistledown, the pseudonymous writer of Bridgerton’s tittle-tattle rag, is voiced by Julie Andrews, just as the CW’s mysterious blogger had Kristen Bell as its narrator. But with Bridgerton, the persona of Lady Whistledown is actually taken from history itself.

Yes: Regency, or late Georgian-era England, was booming with “scandal sheets,” or newspapers strongly focused on personalities and juicy stories. Multiple factors led to this golden age of gossip: In 1695, London got rid of their “Licensing Act,” which previously limited the number of printing presses that could exist. Then there was the shrinking importance of the monarchy. In 1688, parliament significantly limited the power of the king and his court. So by the 1700s, more people could print more things, and they could print them about powerful people to boot.

Come the late 1790s and early 1800s, a few additional societal factors played a part: One, a massive population boom—London went from under a million people in 1801 to around one and a quarter million in 1820. With that came a rise in crime, but also general debauchery like drinking and gambling. Two, there was a greater focus on arts and culture—a lover of beautiful things, the Prince Regent spent lavishly on paintings, buildings, and public works. Suddenly you had an aesthetics-focused society with a seedy underbelly and a weakened monarchy. The final accelerator? Little to no libel laws and, in 1814, the arrival of the mass-producing, industrial printing press.

So what did these gossip rags say? Let’s examine some of the juicier entries. According to an article by Stella Tillyard in History Today, in 1769, various newspapers reported that “an assignation at the White at St. Albans between L—G— and certain great D—e, was disconcerted by the forcible intrusion of my lord’s gentleman.” This makes no sense to us now, but at the time, readers were used to public figures only being identified by their initials. “Readers would easily have identified the great Duke as the King’s brother the Duke of Cumberland, and his lover as the society beauty Lady Grosvenor, and looked forward with salacious anticipation to the next chapter,” wrote Tilyard.

In the 1770s, Town & Country—not, to note, the American publication—began running a monthly column on the sex lives of England’s elite. Making frequent appearances were the Byron family (yes, like Lord). The famous poet’s father, Jack Byron, had a steamy affair in his youth with the married Lady Amelia Carmarthen. The press covered every sordid detail, including their “much tumbled” sheets and secret midnight rendezvous.

Perhaps the most famous paper of them all was The Morning Post. It thrived on bawdy, light-hearted stories about high-society personalities and gossip. They even allowed “puffs,” or flattering paragraphs about individuals one could pay to be placed in a story. (That also worked the other way around: You could pay to have an unflattering paragraph killed.)

Take this entry from February 1815, nonchalantly titled “The Late Faux Paux in High Life.”

“On Sunday morning last, when Lord––– returned from Church, he was met on entering his house by his daughter, a child only six years of age, whom he accompanied to the door of the nursery, which he found closed, and on looking through the key-hole, he saw his Lady with an intimate friend of his Lordship in such situation that is not to be described,” they described in dramatic detail. “His Lordship instantly flew to his chamber, and seizing a pistol, returned to the door of the nursery at the moment it was opened by the adulterer, and leveled it as his head—by raising his arm he avoided the fatal effects of the ball, which he received in his right arm, by which it was shattered.”

Sure, you didn’t know their exact identities. But how many guys in London high-society were walking around in an arm cast that winter?

The Morning Post also exhaustively chronicled the balls of London’s social season, which ran from Easter to the early summer. An account from the Prince Regent’s June 4, 1811, fête in the drawing room at St. James’s Palace, detailed exactly who danced with who: “The first couple who tripped on the light fantastic toe were Earl Percy, and the accomplished, and deservedly celebrated beauty, Lady Jane Montague, daughter of the Duchess of Manchester,” the paper wrote. (Two years later, the Duchess of Manchester left her highborn husband for a footman.) They even wrote a bulleted list: Earl of Digby with the Countess of Jersey, Lord Mark Kerr with Lady Elizabeth Clive, Lord Charles Somerset with Mis Metcalfe, and so on.

Lady Whistledown is, yes, a fictional character. However the sensational coverage of scandal in the Regency era is not a figment of anyone’s imagination, but rather the earliest iteration of tabloid journalism and perhaps even blind-item blogs. Reading The Morning Post, in a way, feels like browsing Crazy Days and Nights or Lainey Gossip. The items are vaguely anonymous but also wacky, unhinged, and a bit questionable in sourcing. Yet you inhale them like cotton candy. As the Queen aptly sums it up in Bridgerton—“I like to be entertained.”