In the eyes of Regency London, Penelope Featherington is a rather unremarkable young lady. The youngest sister of the bombastic Featherington family is quiet, reserved, obedient to the point of subservient – she will never be the queen’s “diamond” of the season. But she has a secret power, one that could change her peers’ lives forever with the flourish of a quill. For she is in fact the real Lady Whistledown, an anonymous newsletter writer who makes and breaks the reputations of the ton’s social elite.

Voiced by Julie Andrews, Lady Whistledown is one of the central characters of Netflix’s phenomenally popular Bridgerton, the most watched show on the platform until Squid Game arrived last year. In her disguise, Penelope (played by Derry Girls’ Nicola Coughlan), uses her proximity to society’s movers and shakers to overhear their secrets and broadcast them to the masses, usually to her own gain.

The first series ended with the bombshell revelation – to viewers – of Lady Whistledown’s identity, and in series two, released on Friday, we will watch as Penelope desperately tries to keep her alter ego concealed, going to extreme lengths to make sure nobody finds out that she is an incredibly powerful gossip.

It’s an understandable plight: should the “ton” find her out, her entire enterprise would be ruined and her family, her friends and society more widely would (rightly) be very upset she had shared their secrets. But more important, at least to a fellow gossip like me, is that she wouldn’t be privy to any more scandalous information.

According to Netflix, 82 million households tuned into series one of Bridgerton, and its appeal is usually attributed to its non-puritanical attitude to sex. But the unashamed celebration of gossip has a lot to do with its success, too. The ton’s obsession with what everyone is up to speaks to our own incurable nosiness.

Gossips – especially women – get a bad rep: we’re untrustworthy and our intrusion into other people’s lives can easily come off as rude. Worse, we can be accused of focusing on others because we are trying to avoid something within ourselves. That may well be the case, but for most of us, it’s simply not that deep. Everyone is prone to sharing tittle-tattle now and then.

Bridgerton’s use of an anonymous gossip-monger has drawn comparisons to Gossip Girl. The mid-2010s New York equivalent to Lady Whistledown, “Gossip Girl” – voiced by Kristen Bell – spread her news via anonymous text messages and a blog, tearing down the teenagers of Manhattan just because she could.

But the concept of an anonymised tattletale hasn’t simply been transposed into the Bridgerton era as an incongruous plot device: coded columns in newspapers were common in the Regency period. Lady Whistledown has a historical model in Mrs Crackenthorpe, the author of Female Tatler, a satirical “scandal sheet” aimed at women readers about 18th-century upper-class society.

One only has to look at a newsstand to draw comparisons with contemporary papers and magazines, of course. In the Noughties, celebrity gossip mags like Heat and Closer were in their prime, splashing Britney’s surprise haircut to Jennifer Aniston’s apparent relationship woes on their covers week-in-week-out. That era may be over, but our appetite for gossip hasn’t waned.

In 2022 and away from traditional media, the internet has inflated the gossip world to a scale Lady Whistledown could only imagine. Anonymous sources flourish on Instagram, where self-proclaimed “curators of pop culture” Deuxmoi, run by an anonymous woman thought to live in New York, shares celebrity spottings and unconfirmed rumours to some 1.4 million followers. She reported that model Emily Ratajowski was pregnant weeks before she announced the birth of her son.

There’s Tattle Life, a website dedicated to discussing influencers and which hit the headlines when mummy blogger Clemmie Hooper aka Mother of Daughters was exposed as a nasty troll on the message boards; Popbitch, a UK-based message board and newsletter sharing gossip about celebrities, media giants and politicians alike; and Diet Prada, another Instagram account that exposes the dark underbelly of the fashion world and its major players.

Podcasts are in on the action, too. Who Weekly?, a show that “tells you everything you need to know about the celebrities you don’t” is hosted by pop culture writers Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber and so popular that it has progressed from a newsletter to a bi-weekly podcast, with a paid subscription arm that gives fans an extra weekly hit of gossip.

These newer gossip-mongers feel different to traditional tabloids – more grassroots and less salacious. The chat is more likely to be about Justin and Hailey Bieber going to dinner or a Euphoria starlet attending a Pilates class than it is the private, inner workings of their relationships. In an era when celebrities have more control over their image than ever thanks to their curated social media feeds, gossip can even out the power imbalance between us and them.

Moreover, these outlets, unbound by publishing codes and top-down scrutiny, often feel empowered to share information that would otherwise be pushed aside by more traditional outlets which (rightly) demand a high standard of proof. The information comes from “blind items”, coded and anonymised snippets of information from those close to the celebrities and industry insiders. Versions of Hollywood #MeToo stories were revealed in blind items long before the Harvey Weinstein scandal blew up in 2017, while blog Crazy Days and Nights first reported on the NXIVM sex cult in 2012.