The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd: The Life and Times of an Urban Legend (review)

Compared with other icons of nineteenth-century fictional terror (the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, Mr. Hyde), Sweeney Todd has enjoyed relatively little academic discussion. Yet the homicidal barber was one of the most recognisable figures of Victorian popular culture and has proved to be one of the most enduring. There are a number of reasons for this scholarly neglect. Unlike the characters above, he emerged solidly from working-class fiction. His first appearance was in the unpromisingly titled novel, The String of Pearls, which was serialised in the publisher Edward Lloyd's People's Periodical and Family Library between 1846 and 1847. Before the serialisation was even finished, Sweeney Todd was purloined for the melodramatic stage when George Dibdin Pitt presented his version at the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton. The character did not acquire a middle-class audience until the twentieth century. Second, because The String of Pearls was an anonymous publication, scholars have not been able to consider it in terms of a particular author's body of work. Third, Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett are arguably caricatures who lack much psychological depth. Finally, the story has not exported well. As Stephen Sondheim remarked about his 1979 musical version staged in New York, "in America [nobody had] ever heard of Sweeney Todd . . . so they were seeing this wild plot for the first time" (qtd. in Mack 269).

This scholarly neglect is now changed by Robert Mack's book about the lives of Sweeney Todd. Do not be put off by the lurid pseudo-Victorian title. This is a carefully researched and deeply serious attempt to understand the meanings and functions of the Sweeney Todd figure. In The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd, Mack, who has also edited a scholarly edition of The String of Pearls for Oxford University Press, probes the culture that made Sweeney Todd possible. He argues that the character emerged from a cluster of myths, tropes, and story archetypes that were prevalent in the mid-nineteenth century but often had older lineages.

The first section of the book is concerned with unravelling this cultural landscape. He commences naturally with the taboo-driven fascination with cannibalism, a theme to which he frequently returns and one that continues to resonate in the news and the sensational fiction of our own time (for example, the novels and films about Hannibal Lecter). By page six, we are into a lengthy inquiry into cooks and the meaning of pies that puts Mrs. Lovett's allegedly delicious cuisine into context. Additionally, Mack locates the story in terms of the popular fascination with grotesque violence, presenting Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett as figures comparable to Punch and Judy. A literary critic, Mack traces the narrative's Homeric dimension: the story usually concerns sailors who have returned from abroad, at least one of whom makes the mistake of going to Todd's shop for a shave, thus evoking Odysseus's homecoming.

The second section explores the original String of Pearls story as both narrative and cultural event. He describes how a novel that presented itself as a conventional romance (in a periodical aimed at a family audience) swiftly became a classic horror story. The String of Pearls (like many subsequent versions) is set in the later eighteenth century, and, like William Harrison Ainsworth's Rookwood (1834) or Jack Sheppard (1839), romanticised the crimes of that period. Unlike the late Peter Haining (whose pioneering research on Sweeney Todd receives some mild criticism here), Mack has no truck with the belief that the character actually existed. It has been common to argue that he was inspired by the seventeenth-century brigand and cannibal Sawney Beane. Mack, however, also uncovers a seventeenth-century memoir that describes a Calais barber who murdered his clients and dispatched them through a trap door to be turned into pies by a local baker. The author...