Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

The characters of Sweeney Todd, Mrs. Lovett, Tobias, and Johanna originated in the Victorian tradition of the penny dreadful. Penny dreadfuls were serialized stories with cheap prices that made them widely accessible throughout the United Kingdom during the 19th century. During the Industrial Revolution, the technology to produce literature at a mass scale was developed, driving literacy across all segments of the population, including the working class. The young men of the British working class were drawn to the sensational quality of penny dreadfuls, which often featured tales of crime, suspense, and horror. By the latter half of the century, hundreds of publishers sold over a million periodical titles every week. Apart from Todd, popular penny dreadful characters included Varney the Vampire and a fictional hero based on the historical highwayman Dick Turpin.

Sweeney Todd first appeared in a serial that ran from 1846 to 1847 entitled The String of Pearls: A Domestic Romance, a story attributed to either James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Peckett Prest. In the story, a woman named Johanna Oakley traces the disappearance of her lover to Todd, a barber on Fleet Street. She soon discovers that Todd has been killing his customers and bringing them to his neighbor, Mrs.