“Bridgerton” (2020- ) is a US television show on Netflix based on the romance novels of Julia Quinn. Like Jane Austen’s love stories, it is set in Regency England of the 1810s, but one with a handsome Black duke! It is brought to us by Shonda Rhimes, she who gave us “Grey’s Anatomy” (2005- ) and “Scandal” (2012-18). It has just been renewed for a second season.
Regency England, the one in our universe, did not have a Black duke, handsome or otherwise. But it did have actual Black people (Sarah Baartman among them), got rich off of Black slavery, and had a queen, Queen Charlotte, who was part African by blood.
Queen Charlotte, circa 1784.
Cast: The Duke is played by Regé-Jean Page, who played Chicken George in the remake of “Roots” (2016). Lady Danbury, the mother figure in his life, is played by Adjoa Andoh. She was Martha Jones’s mother in “Doctor Who” in the late 2000s. Both are British actors. The rest of the cast is unfamiliar to me.
Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) and the Duke (Regé-Jean Page).
Lady Danbury:
“We were two separate societies, divided by colour, until a king fell in love with one of us.”
That is how “one of us” became queen, leading to the racial integration of England. Compare that to the actual England of the 2010s wherein a very light-skinned Black duchess (Meghan Markle) was a bridge too far (Megxit), where Britain has torn itself from the European Union to stop the immigration of fellow White people from Eastern Europe (Brexit), where period dramas like this are beloved, one suspects, because they present a mythical all-White-everything past – a trope “Bridgerton” upends.
Race: But what could have been sharp and profound commentary on race is mostly just turned into a sugarplum fantasy. It is colour blind in the worst sense – of mostly just ignoring the whole issue of race. One character does talk about how Blacks have to be exceptional to navigate the new Kumbaya England (pretty much the “twice-as-good” parental talk that also appeared in “Scandal”), but that is pretty much it. Little if nothing is said of slavery. The sugar of those sugarplums came from somewhere.
Asian characters: There were a few, here and there, but only one, South Asian, spoke. Briefly.
Symbolism without substance: Race was a twist added to Quinn’s lily-White novels, which is a wonderful idea, but it was largely wasted. But, maybe as with Black presidents and Black duchesses, even that little bit was going to be too much for many White people.
Colourism: As colour-blind as the casting seems to be, colourism still abounds. Good characters are generally lighter-skinned, evil or unimportant ones, darker-skinned.
Fashion: Anachronisms also abound. Just as Regency England did not have Black dukes, neither did it have zippers, polyester, corsets, magenta dyes, nor did it lack for bonnets. And the queen in 1813 did not wear her hair or dress like it was still 1761. It is not a profound mystery how she looked: we have paintings of her from that time.
Overall, though, it was fun to watch.
– Abagond, 2021.
See also:
- The Roots remake
- colourism
- sugar
- “I don’t see colour, I just see a human being”
- Black Britain
- The British through time: the last 10,000 years – not as lily-White as many suppose
- Dido Elizabeth Belle
- Sarah Baartman – same time and place as “Bridgerton”
- Meghan Markle
- Afua Hirsch: Brit(ish)
- black men, white women
572
Abagond 
Meghan wasn’t chased out because of her colour. It’s a lazy and ignorant narrative. Meghan was LOVED when we first heard about her. Feelings changed when she moaned about ‘living’ while on tour in the poorest continent in the world and when it became clear she wanted to leave Blighty for Hollywood. And I’m not sure what’s racist about leaving a white union lmao. If anything it’s xenophobic but, again, if you don’t live here then you’ll most likely fail to understand any reason deeper than ‘they don’t like others’.
And as for Bridgterton, it’s meant to be light entertainment with an inclusive cast. Not sure how much of an escape it can be if race is brought up. This reminds me of how POC actors are always asked questions about their race in interviews. Aren’t we tired? There’s a time and place.
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Rege’-Jean Page is a handsome devil.
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it saddens me that a black person chose to adapt this. the novel series makes light of the reality and now this will further skew the historical perspective
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“the novel series makes light of the reality and now this will further skew the historical perspective”
You are overthinking this. Look at it for what it is, female oriented porn. What I want to know is when will Shonda Rhimes make the black billionaire list?
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I am not overthinking this one. this is whitewashed history under the guise of representation.
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@ DurtVanDutch
…this is whitewashed history under the guise of representation.
Agreed.
Many people are ignorant of history and some take anything on tv or in the movies at face value. In a effort to integrate a cast, Black folk are shown doing and saying the most unlkely things at the most unlikely times in history.
There were Africans and people of African descent in England from Roman times. Some were free soldiers, diplomats, muscians, poets, dancers, servants and slaves. However, to tell their stories, Africa’s contributions to the world and the role of race, ethnicity and color would have to be discussed.
One that comes to mind is the very real story of Adolf Badin (1747-1822). Badin was a member of the Swedish court, avid book collector, diplomat and palace manager among other things.
https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/badin-adolf-1747-1822/
There were also a fair number of Africans, known as “Blackmoores” in Elizabethan England (1500s to early 1600s). Elizabeth I used the Africans as scapegoats during times of crisis. She issued proclamations against Africans in England in attempts to shift blame from the suffering caused by poor harvests, etc. onto the Africans. [Nothing new there.]
In 1596, Elizabeth I, wrote to the lord mayors of England’s major cities:
[In modern English: “…recently there have been various African brought into this country. There are too many of them here.”]
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/early_times/elizabeth.htm
Like Abagond wrote in this post, if this “history under the guise of representation” were honest, answers to the question of where “the sugar [for] those sugarplums” came from would be included. Honesty would further include scenes of Africans laboring in sugar cane fields under the sweltering sun on an island in the Caribbean.
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People, Rhimes is an entertainer, not a historian, color neutral casting, jarring initially, keeps black actors employed. It can be defended as a form of Brechtian distancing. “Brecht first used the term in an essay on “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting” published in 1936, in which he described it as “playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience’s subconscious”.[1]”
Strangely, in Rhimes’s hand, it has the opposite effect, especially on Blacks.
“Like Abagond wrote in this post, if this “history under the guise of representation” were honest, answers to the question of where “the sugar [for] those sugarplums” came from would be included. Honesty would further include scenes of Africans laboring in sugar cane fields under the sweltering sun on an island in the Caribbean”
If Abagond really cared about history he’d write about the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam , the Indian farmers’ struggle against their government and corporations working hand in hand, or the 1794 abolition of slavery by the French National Convention instead of this fluff.
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perhaps this “fluff” might be useful? The idea that “power” (Queen, Duke…etc) can be shared by non-whites and it won’t be the end of the world might be much needed imagery in an inward-looking xenophobic “West”?
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“perhaps this “fluff” might be useful?” Anything under the sun can be useful, but how likely is it? We have had a number of non-whites wielding power in the ‘real’ world. The result? more xenophobia a/k/a backlash.
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Upthread I wrote: “There were Africans and people of African descent in England from Roman times.”
Then I read Abagond’s fascinating article about The British through time: the last 10,000 years.
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2019/04/16/the-british-through-time-the-last-10000-years/
Cheddar Man and Whitehawk Woman may not have been African per se, but they still had some recognizable African features and coloring. They were in the process of mutating, migrating and mingling.
Abagond, thanks for that link.
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well my english studies (major in college) gravitated towards romantic period, ie pre-victorian england, still this makes me cringe, and i watch british tv
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I watched part of the first episode. Once I saw where the plot was heading, I knew this wasn’t the show for me for many reasons.
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“Regency England, the one in our universe, did not have a Black duke, handsome or otherwise.”
Not strictly true. You forgot the heirs of Pushkin: ” Hugh Grosvenor, son of the sixth Duke of Westminster, has inherited an enormous fortune following the death of his father, whose lineage can be traced back to Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and the Romanov dynasty.
Gerald Grosvenor, the sixth Duke of Westminster, passed away on Aug. 9. His vast fortune will be passed on to his 25-year-old son and male heir, Hugh Grosvenor, in accordance with the British inheritance law of primogeniture.
Back in 1992 Grosvenor said of his son: “My main object will be to teach him self-discipline and a sense of duty. He has been born with the longest silver spoon anyone can have, but he can’t go through life sucking on it. He has to put back what he has been given.”
It is difficult to say whether or not the duke was able to keep this silver spoon away from his son – Hugh Grosvenor has been exceptionally well endowed by fate. A descendent of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and the Romanov tsars as well as godfather to Prince George, Grosvenor has just inherited property in 70 cities around the world and has become the world’s youngest billionaire, with a total net worth of $12.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Until recently, Hugh Grosvenor had led a modest lifestyle and had been working as a client relations manager with a bio-fuel company. The only extravagance the heir had permitted himself so far was a 21st birthday party with a price tag of £5 million.
The trace of the Pushkins
The descendants of Pushkin made their way to England via Germany. After a first unhappy marriage, the poet’s daughter, Natalya Pushkina, became the morganatic wife of the German prince Nikolaus Wilhelm von Nassau and lived with him in the German town of Wiesbaden.
10 reasons why Pushkin is so great
“How strange it is to see the offspring of Pushkin, our demi-god, married to a German,” the Russian feminist Anna Filosofova wrote to Dostoyevsky on Jan. 19 1880. “Thus far she has proved so beautiful, very courteous, and her German husband is such a good fellow, an exceptionally good-hearted gentleman.”
To make up for the uneven basis of the marriage, Pushkina was granted the title of Countess von Merenburg, a title named after a castle in Nassau that did not entitle her to any land. She lived harmoniously with her German relatives but held firmly to her roots: She taught her daughters Russian, and converted a hall of her German palace into a museum devoted to her father.
The British period
In 1891, Pushkina’s daughter, Sofia Merenburg, became the morganatic wife of Mikhail Romanov (the grandson of tsar Nikolai I), and the pair came to live in London. Their daughter, Anastasia de Torby, was therefore both a descendent of Pushkin and of Tsar Nicholas I, a fact not devoid of irony – Nicholas made life difficult for the freedom-loving poet on more than one occasion.
Anastasia de Torby. Source: Philip de László
De Torby married a rich industrialist, and created a sort of Russian exhibition at her English estate of Luton Hoo, complete with a copy of the Bronze Horseman statue in St. Petersburg and portraits of Pushkin and Nicholas I.
Anastasia once paid a visit to the USSR, visiting the “Pushkin sights” in Leningrad. Her daughter, Alexandra, the older sister of Hugh Grosvenor’s mother, is a much more frequent visitor to Russia and organizes school trips to St. Petersburg. She is also the founder of the Pushkin Prize for Literature.
It was Natalya, Anastasia’s younger daughter, who married Gerald Grosvenor, sixth Duke of Westminster and heir to one of the largest fortunes in Great Britain, and they are the parents of the latest billionaire, Hugh.”
It goes without saying that the one drop rule is applied in this case.
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Not a duke, but no slave. “Charles Kenneth Mackenzie (1788–1862) was a Scottish diplomat, writer and journalist.
Life
He was the eldest son of Kenneth Francis Mackenzie,[1] who had plantation interests in the West Indies, and at the time of Fedon’s Rebellion acted as president of the council in Grenada;[2] there are sources stating that Charles Mackenzie would have been classified as a Negro in the USA.[3] Colin Mackenzie was his brother.
He was educated at the University of Edinburgh, where he befriended James Cowles Prichard,[1] and served in the Peninsular War. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1815.[4] He then edited a conservative evening paper, Albion.[1]
Subsequently, he was a diplomat in Mexico, Haiti and Cuba;[4] in Haiti at least he did intelligence work.[5] Returning to England, he wrote for The Metropolitan Magazine, under the editorship of Cyrus Redding.[1]
During the latter part of his life he lived mostly in the United States, where he died on 6 July 1862 at a fire at the Rainbow Hotel on Beekman Street[6] in New York City.[4]
Mackenzie collected plants for August Grisebach and William Jackson Hooker.[4]
Works
Mackenzie published Notes on Haiti in two volumes (1830), based on his period 1826–7 as British consul there, and including both economic statistics and social observations.[7] Parts were republished shortly by John Brown Russwurm, to publicise the Haitian Revolution.[8]
Mackenzie wrote also for the Edinburgh Review, Quarterly Review, and Encyclopædia Britannica.[9] ”
‘Sable’ gents did exist in that era.
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