The Story of Sweeney Todd
Sweeney Todd is a fictional villain/antihero. A barber and serial killer, the character appears in various English language works starting in the mid-19th century. His weapon of choice is a straight razor, with which he cuts his victim’s throats; in some versions of the story his love, friend and accomplice, Margery (sometimes Nellie or Claudett) Lovett, bakes the carcasses into meat pies. Todd’s first appearance could have been in a British penny dreadful called The People’s Periodical. The story in which he appeared was titled “The String of Pearls: A Romance” and was probably written by Thomas Preist, who created a number of other gruesome villains. He tended to base his horror stories on grains of truth, sometimes gaining inspiration from real crime reports in The Times. It is sometimes claimed that the Sweeney Todd story is based upon fact, but no reliable evidence of this has ever been found. According to the tale, Todd was tried at the Old Bailey and hanged at Tyburn in January 1802, in front of a large crowd. However, no record of the trial can be found in the Old Bailey sessions papers of the Newgate Calendar, nor are there any contemporaray press reports either of the trial or of the hanging. The myth’s imagery of meat pies made from people is almost certainly an allusion to the finale of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and the original Roman tale on which it was based. There is thought to have been a Jacobin barber who cut the throats of his customers during the French Revolution, though for politics rather than profit.