Mystery, Mythology and Murder: A Cultural History of Sweeney Todd
The Demon Barber’s Evolution from 1846–2007
The figure of Sweeney Todd has become integrated into British culture. His name is the cockney rhyming slang for the branch of police known as the ‘flying squad,’ he has a cameo in Terry Pratchett’s Dodger as a disturbed barber with PTSD, and there are two interactive exhibits featuring him and Mrs Lovett in The London Dungeons experience on the South Bank. As Benjamin Poore observed, contemporary creatives ‘repeatedly evoke and reinvent the nineteenth-century villain’ (Poore 2017, p. 1), and Sweeny Todd is no exception. Yet the most commonly known Sweeney Todd character and plot of today is vastly different to its origins, as stories often get retold in different ways in new material and cultural environments and survive by virtue of mutation. Linda Hutcheon identifies that:
An adaptation’s double nature does not mean, however, that proximity of fidelity to the adapted text should be the criterion of judgement or the focus of the analysis (2006, p. 6).
Therefore, this article will explore Sweeney Todd’s cultural evolution from ‘homicidal butcher’ (O’Callaghan 2017, p. 256) in the 1846–7 serial novel Sweeney Todd: The String of Pearls to the vengeful rogue obsessed with a perverted sense of justice in Stephen…
