Emma: A Victorian Romance - Season 1

There are two things I can be a sucker for (ok there are more than two but these especially), one is a bit of Victoriana, the other is a good romance. Put them together and do them right and we it's even better. Of course, the best Victorian love story barely takes place in that era and manages to cover more time than perhaps any other novel, Michael Moorcock’s gloriously amoral The Dancers at the End of Time, but that only being a series of three novels and not an anime, and there being a sale and my usual absurd supply of blu-rays needing to be kept up, I decided to take a punt on the first season of Emma: A Victorian Romance, an anime harking back to 2005, of which I knew nothing.

The question would be was it worth it?

Working as a maid to an ex-governess named Ms Stownar,  Emma happens to open the door into Ms Stownar’s old charge, William Jones, who comes to visit. Son and heir to an industrial fortune, William is smitten and Emma may also be equally affected. Victorian attitudes being what they are, love cannot hope to run smoothly.

Being the first season of two, and a brisk 12-episoides, it’s fair to say I suspected there would be no completion to the story and indeed there is  not. Now I await the appearance of the second season, which I ordered about halfway into the first episode. Yes, I paused the first episode only about ten minutes to order it while still on sale. It was that classic scenario of the series subtly feeling right. True, there was always the possibility that this first season would unravel and turn into a messy hodge-podge of unremitting bollocks (to use the technical terminology) but thankfully it never did and I somehow felt it wouldn’t. Being a series where tone matters, it would have to deviate enormously for it to fail.

It’s an interesting proposition as a series, as in many ways often very little happens and much of the story takes the turns that you expect. William’s father, when he learns that his son might have affections outside the aristocratic family he would like William to marry into, is unsurprisingly unsympathetic (it is often mentioned Britain is two countries, those who are respectable - read: rich, and those who are not), as are many of William’s younger siblings. There is the attempt to encourage William into the arms of Eleanor Campbell, who is proper aristocracy, which to an extent William accepts but only in the sense of going through the motions and makes no suggestion ever of particular affection for Eleanor. All this is standard plotting but it is well handled, emotionally thoughtful, and the characterisation is nuanced so that there is no one here that seems the villain or unsympathetic; everyone has their own set of emotions and beliefs, and the story respects that. That is perhaps why it works - Eleanor could be an entitled rich bitch but she’s as sensitive and at the whim of others as everyone else, and William is aware of this, as he is aware of trying to go through the motions of family duty while courting (yes, let’s be old fashioned about it) Emma.  

Emma, too, is intriguing as you could argue she is one step away from being a wet rag of a character. She could easily have been shaded in as a young dull trudge but falls just the right side of a rounded human being. As a maid much of her life is work: early mornings, late nights, little time of her own; but again, she’s given enough colour to come alive as a character while being true to what a person in her position would be: not outrageous and conscious of class. These are people of a particular milieu and again the story respects that, rather than attempting to enforce a modern interpretation. That is why I keep repeating, at the risk of sounding like I am damning through faint praise, that most characters and scenarios are just the right side of not falling into cliche or lazy characterisation. How integral this is perhaps hard to over emphasise, because there are almost no explosive emotions; in true Victorian understatement, most emotions are illustrated in other ways; how William shops in the same place every day in the hope of bumping into Emma as she comes back from Convent Garden market; quiet gestures become meaningful because expansive emotions are not natural to their circumstances.

That said, the story introduces a character that allows us to brush away some of the Victorian Britishness, Hakim, an Indian prince, a friend of William, who moves into William’s family home with his harem. It sounds awful, I’ll grant you, a stereotyped nonsense, but again it manages to mainly keep the right side of things. Hakim is no racial stereotype and exists you feel in many ways to be a balance to what is otherwise seen and heard. He has an outsider’s view and even his harem is visually shown to be almost disinterested, an intentional tableau rather than anything else, and it works because of that. Where arguably it doesn’t work is Hakim also falls for Emma, though willingly gives up thought of her for WIlliam’s sake. It’s a minor misstep but it feels like adding drama to no great purpose, especially considering Hakim’s outsider eccentricities throughout function on their own terms. To have him suddenly also fall for our maid seems forced. Perhaps equally forced is an exploration (towards the end of the season) of Emma’s past. Maybe the second season will make more of this, but for me it seemed odd because if anything its revelations undermined some of her later decisions. So time will tell on that.

Yet these two aspects never undermine the subtle romance that goes on. And though Emma and William are characters that keep most of their feelings under the surface, it’s that slow roil that make it work. Anything more would have seemed unreal.  

Reality too comes up in much of the design of the series. Being nearly 20-years old, its not as sharp visually as newer series, but this never matters because the design of it is generally spot on. Some of this could easily be missed, such as when they pass certain shops, where the shop fronts are spot on to Victorian times and you still sometimes see aspects of today. Of course, considering the setting is late Victorian London (which if you do not pick up from them taking a walk before the Albert Memorial you will from the introduction of a motor car) means that they do like to use the city as a backdrop, which includes a trip to the Crystal Palace, even including the ‘invented’ dinosaurs that you still see in Crystal Palace Park. OK, to the denizens of the metropolis some things may seem a bit odd and just trying to use the city for show. Why, if Ms Stownar lives in Marylebone Street, would Emma and William always go walking in Hyde Park when the Regents Park is just up the road? Would Emma really walk all the way down to Covent Garden market every day to do her shopping? But this never matters, and how they use the city never intrudes, though the quiet attention to detail, like those riding or in a carriage down Rotten Row as other are strolling on the less dusty pavements by the Serpentine, adds to the time and place.  

And time and place in Emma really matter, as I said does character. True though in many ways the drama is of the quiet sort (and so should it be) the first season does end on something of a cliffhanger, or I should say a gently dramatic moment. So will the second and final season live up this oddly engaging first season? I truly hope so. Because there’s something unusual in here, a drama that never tries too hard and often we understand people in the small things, such as Emma’s relationship to her employer, and even to her employer’s relations to a local handyman, Al. There’s something too in how William’s family are industrialists, rich not through birth but through earnest work inventing, creating, selling;. This creates a bridge between themselves and Emma, in that regardless of their current station, they understand and appreciate the merits of hard work, even if William’s father wants to buy his way into nobility.  

Something else, too, was that I was pleased to see a release not just of an old series but one which focuses on drama. True it’s been out a while, but a reminder that often it’s worth looking to older, neglected releases as much as the latest hot title.