The Legend of Sweeney Todd

The case

This is a legend, not a case. There is no record that a barber named Sweeney Todd ever lived, killed or was hanged in London. What can be documented is the moment the story entered print: on 21 November 1846, in the seventh issue of a cheap weekly called The People's Periodical and Family Library, published by Edward Lloyd, the first instalment of a serial titled The String of Pearls: A Romance.

Over eighteen weekly parts, ending on 20 March 1847, readers followed the disappearance of a sailor, Lieutenant Thornhill, last seen entering a barber's shop beside St Dunstan's church in Fleet Street. He had been carrying a string of pearls as a gift for Johanna Oakley, whose sweetheart was believed lost at sea. Thornhill's dog waits outside the shop. His friends start asking questions. Johanna disguises herself as a boy and takes a job in the shop. Nearby, in Bell Yard, Mrs Lovett's pie shop does a roaring trade.

The secret, revealed in the closing instalments, is a barber's chair over a trapdoor that tips customers into the cellar, an underground passage to the bakery, and pies made from the victims. The story is set in 1785 and ends with Mrs Lovett poisoned by her partner and Todd arrested and hanged. It was penny-dreadful fiction, written fast for working-class readers who wanted sensation in weekly doses.

Who wrote it is uncertain. Lloyd's stable of writers did not sign their work. The serial was long credited to Thomas Peckett Prest, and more recent scholarship favours James Malcolm Rymer, the author of Varney the Vampire; it is possible the two shared the job. Lloyd republished an expanded version in 1847 and 1848, and in 1850 issued it as a book of more than seven hundred pages, with a different ending in which Todd escapes and is later shot.

The stage made Todd a household name before the serial had even finished. George Dibdin Pitt adapted the story for the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton in early 1847 and billed it as founded on fact. It was Pitt's version that gave Todd his catchphrase about polishing customers off. Variations on the melodrama played across Britain for the rest of the century.

The plot itself was older than the serial. A Swedish traveller, Pehr Lindeström, recorded hearing a nearly identical tale in Calais in the seventeenth century. A Paris version, set in the rue de la Harpe and supposedly drawn from police records of around 1800, was printed in a London magazine in the 1820s. Charles Dickens joked about cat-meat pies in The Pickwick Papers and about the makers of cannibal pastry said in country legends to do a lively trade in the capital in Martin Chuzzlewit, a few years before Todd appeared.

The claim that Sweeney Todd was real began with the publishers. The 1850 book edition's introduction asserted it, and Pitt's playbills hinted at it. In the twentieth century an author published two books arguing that Todd was a real barber who had killed around 1800 and been hanged after a trial at the Old Bailey. Researchers who checked his references against the court records, newspapers and the Newgate Calendar could not find the cases he described. No trial, execution or barber's shop matching the story has been identified.