Mrs. Lovett & Sweeney Todd (From the Crime Library)
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Sweeney Todd's accomplice is even more shrouded in mystery than the murderous barber himself. Her surname was undoubtedly Lovett, but whether her first name was Margery or Sarah remains a mystery. Haining argues in favor of Margery, as most of the articles written about her use that name. She was less than beautiful, according to articles written at the time of her arrest, and her smile came not from her heart, but was as false as the veal filling in her pies.
Mrs. Lovett was a widow, whose first husband had died under mysterious circumstances and no one was ever able to place her in Sweeney Todd's presence in public. The pair were lovers, though, and apparently their passions were fulfilled after a successful murder and butchering job. She liked the finer things in life, considered herself better than her working class background, and used her portion of the profits to furnish silk sheets and fine furniture in her apartment above her Bell Yard bakery.
How she met Sweeney Todd is a mystery, but apparently he set her up in her shop in Bell Yard. He had been busy "polishing off" - Sweeney's own play on words - his customers for some time before he brought Mrs. Lovett into the act. Until she started using his victims in her meat pies, Todd had been using the abandoned crypts beneath St. Dunstan's church to hide his handiwork. There, he managed to store the bodies amid the dozens of family crypts that time had all but forgotten. But he was running out of room and needed a new way to dispose of his murder victims.
Thomas Peckett Prest was the first author to write the tale of Sweeney Todd and Margery Lovett shortly after their arrest and trial. He had worked on Fleet Street and was familiar with Lovett's two-story pie shop. In the basement of the shop was the bakery, and a false wall could be opened to reveal the catacombs behind. It was through this false wall that Todd would apparently deliver his ghastly pie fillings. Prest described the shop this way: "On the left side of Bell Yard, going down from Carey Street, was, at the time we write of, one of the most celebrated shops for the sale of veal and pork pies that London had ever produced. High and low, rich and poor, resorted to it; its fame had spread far and wide; and at twelve o'clock every day when the first batch of pies was sold there was a tremendous rush to obtain them.
"Oh, those delicious pies," wrote Prest (who probably sampled one or two in his time). "There was about them a flavour never surpassed and rarely equaled; the paste was of the most delicate construction, and impregnated with the aroma of delicious gravy that defied description."
Barbers in Sweeney Todd's day were more than just hair-cutters and shavers. Their trade extended into all sorts of medicinal acts, and a sick person was just as likely to seek treatment from a barber as from a doctor. All that anatomy training came in handy for Sweeney Todd, who having dumped a victim from his barber chair, would race down to the basement with just a dim oil lamp to guide him and proceed to process the victim for disposal.
First, Todd would strip the valuables from the body - taking time to slit the victim's throat if necessary - and then he would remove the deceased's clothing. Working quickly to avoid the problems associated with rigor mortis, Sweeney Todd would disjoint the limbs and sever them from the body, taking time to remove the skin, which was unusable for pies. Then, in the dank cavern, in just the flickering light of his oil lamps and candles, Todd would gut his poor victim like a hunter dresses a deer. All of the meat would be stripped from the bones, which he would pile off to the side, and the vital organs that would be ground up for pie fillings and the fresh meat would be boxed for delivery to Mrs. Lovett. The bones he would scatter amid the remains in the catacombs, where they were virtually indistinguishable from the bodies of persons who had died a more natural death.
No one believes that Mrs. Lovett was solely responsible for baking her renowned meat pies. A 1924 account states that she had a hired girl and a male pie maker who helped with the preparation. It was unlikely that either of them suspected where Mrs. Lovett's meat supply came from, and C.W. Biller, in that 1924 biography, asserts that anyone who began to suspect "they, too, became pie filling."
St. Dunstan's was old and musty, but the smell, which permeated the church and sacristy, was putrid beyond comprehension. They had been burying people in the catacombs there for hundreds of years, and never before had the smell of decay and death been so prevalent. It got so bad that ladies attending the services would require a handkerchief scented with vinegar or perfume in order to sit through the services, and the parson himself was reported to "sneeze in the midst of discourse and to hold to his pious mouth a handkerchief, in which was some strong and pungent essence, for the purpose of trying to overcome the effluvia."
The matter went on for some months before anyone thought to contact the authorities to investigate. At first the church leaders were afraid that some sort of disease was rampant in the facility, and they contacted the London health department (such as it was in the 18th century), but a study of the parishioners and others nearby found no more deaths or sicknesses than normal. At their wits' end, the church fathers sought the help of the Bow Street Runners to begin an investigation. The Beadle of St. Dunstan's, known to history only as "Mr. Otton", was also a constable for the Runners and he took the matter to his chief, Sir Richard Blunt, who had taken charge of the police force after the death of Henry Fielding.
The smell, Otton told Blunt, reminded him of the smell of rotting corpses, but no one had been buried in St. Dunstan's in many years, and the catacombs below the church had been adequately sealed. Blunt and Otton launched an investigation, descending into the bowels of the church and inspecting the vaults they found there. None had been disturbed, although the stench was much stronger in the crypt. The sewers, which ran near the church, were also scrutinized, and they were found to be in working order and not leaking offal into the church. Blunt left the church with a firmer understanding of the problem, but with no idea what the cause might be.
Another Runner was to provide the link between Sweeney Todd and the mysterious stench of St. Dunstan's Church. It seemed that the rumors of the mysterious disappearances of several sailors who vanished after seeking a polishing off at Sweeney's barbershop had started the gossips' tongues wagging, and the constable dutifully reported the chit-chat to Blunt. Sir Richard didn't immediately put Todd together with the smell, but employing the now-common police technique of records investigation, Blunt found that Sweeney Todd had once been accused of theft of a pair of silver shoe buckles. The case had not stood up because the buckles were of a fairly common sort, but the woman who charged the barber with the theft was adamant that her husband, who had mysteriously disappeared one day, had worn the exact same buckles on his shoes.
Sir Richard was savvy enough to assume that where there is smoke, there is fire, and he put Todd's shop under a close watch. In typical bureaucratic fashion, Sir Richard reported his suspicions to his superiors and was given the green light to "use whatever means might be necessary" to solve the mystery. Over the next several months, three Runners watching Sweeney's barbershop reported that men had entered the store for a shave or haircut and had not been seen to leave. Sir Richard became more convinced that Todd was murdering clients, and that somehow, St. Dunstan's Church was involved. He decided to revisit the vaults, this time with a crew of Bow Street's finest, to get to the bottom of the issue.
Armed with just a compass, walking stick, and oil lanterns, the men descended once again into the fetid stench of the church's crypt. After a few moments of searching they stumbled across the crypt of the Weston family, which had been one of the Demon Barber's favorite dumping grounds. What they found there was reported in the newspapers in gruesome detail: "Piled one upon each other and reaching halfway up to the ceiling, lay a decomposing mass of human remains. Heaped one upon another heedlessly tossed into the disgusting heap any way, lay pieces of gaunt skeletons with pieces of flesh here and there only adhering to the bones. Heads in a similar state of decay were tumbled about, the whole enough to strike such horror into the heart of any man," wrote the Courier in its account of Sweeney Todd's trial.
Coming to the horrible realization that they had finally located the source of the stench, the Bow Street Runners pressed on, following bloodstained footprints until they disappeared at the back of a shop, apparently on Bell Yard. Sir Richard, who was known as an acute thinker, realized that Sweeney Todd was murdering his clients, and what was worse, he was disposing of the evidence by serving the meat in a pie.
But still more evidence was needed. There was thought to be no way to identify the remains found in the Weston crypt, and no way to tie the murders to Sweeney Todd and Margery Lovett, save for the gossips on Fleet Street. The Runners would have to move quickly, yet carefully, lest a blatant investigation scare the murderous duo away. There was no requirement for a search warrant at the time, and Sir Richard ordered his men to accompany every customer into Sweeney Todd's barbershop to keep him from practicing his macabre craft until a Runner had a chance to search his apartment for more evidence. Undoubtedly, for the next several days, the Bow Street Runners were the most neatly shaved police force in the world as they kept tabs on the Demon Barber. The chance to search the house came two days after the discoveries beneath the church, and the Runner dispatched to the house was able to locate a veritable treasure trove of booty from Sweeney Todd's apartment. He noted the names and initials found in some of the clothing and jewelry and reported in to Sir Richard.
Wasting no more time, Blunt dispatched a group of Runners to arrest Margery Lovett, and set out with another squad to pick up Sweeney Todd. The arrest of Mrs. Lovett was not without incident. When the Runners arrived at her shop, she was serving some of her ever-present customers and as they learned the horrid contents of their delicious meals, they attempted to lynch Margery Lovett.
"The people who were in the shop spread the news all over the neighbourhood and the place was soon jammed up with a maddened mob. They poured from Fleet Street and Carey Street determined to tear her to bits and hang her on the lamp post in the middle of Bell Yard," reports an anonymous author in an 1878 version of Sweeney Todd's life.
The Runners were able to hurry Mrs. Lovett away in a waiting carriage, and she was taken to a cell in Newgate Prison.
Blunt's arrest of Sweeney Todd, on the other hand, went without incident. The barber was alone in his shop when the Bow Street Runners entered and clapped the handcuffs, or darbies, on the Demon Barber. He was already behind bars in Newgate Prison before any civilians knew he was involved in the horror of Bell Yard.
Even in a sprawling city like London, news about the goings-on in Bell Yard and Fleet Street spread rapidly by word-of-mouth. The street outside Sweeney Todd's shop was soon packed with the curious and the vengeful, and Bell Yard, which served as a pass-through for lawyers on their way to the court buildings nearby, was made impassable by the sheer number of gawkers who came to peer in the windows of Margery Lovett's once popular pie shop.
The newspapers of the time had a field day with the story, reporting rumors and fact with equal zeal. Sir Richard was considered a hero by the people, and as he continued to gather evidence for the upcoming trial, interest in the work of the Bow Street Runners was diverting much of his attention.
Margery Lovett had wasted no time in confessing her sins to the governor of Newgate Prison. She revealed the entire plot and Sweeney Todd's role in it, "believing herself on the edge of the grave" and wishing to come clean before she was hanged. It was clear by her confession that she intended to take Sweeney Todd with her when she swung from the gallows. But Margery Lovett was to cheat the hangman, and nearly squash the Crown's case against the demon barber.
Acting in the dual role of police and prosecutor, Sir Richard was stunned in December 1801 when he was advised that Mrs. Lovett had poisoned herself in her cell at Newgate. How she came by the poison is unknown, but as a woman of means she might have been able to bribe a jailer, and authorities learned that she had had a delivery of some clothes from her home shortly before she died. Haining surmises that Lovett might have had poison hidden away in the clothes for just such a situation.
London was abuzz as the trial of Sweeney Todd approached in December 1801. "Scarcely ever in London has such an amount of public excitement been produced by any criminal proceedings as by the trial of Sweeney Todd," wrote the Daily Courant. "So great is the excitement that sober-minded men, who do not see any peculiar interest in the sayings and doings of a great criminal, are disgusted that the popular taste should run that way.
"Be that as it may, the case of Rex v. Sweeney Todd will certainly be one of the trials of the age."
That prescient prediction by the newspaper was held to be true as the trial opened. Sweeney Todd had not been told of the death of Margery Lovett prior to his trial, and when he was informed, he apparently turned pale, "like some great, gaunt ghost."
Todd was actually on trial for just one murder, that a seaman, Francis Thornhill. Despite the large number of bodies and the mountain of evidence found at his home, police could scarcely identify any other victims. Sir Richard had rightly surmised that although the barber was a mass murderer, one slaying would be sufficient to send him to the gallows.
Dressed in a red gown, chain, and white peruke, the attorney general, representing King George III, opened his case. A reporter for the Newgate Calender - the long-serving recorder of criminal behavior in England - dutifully took down the statements.
"Mr. Thornhill had been commissioned to take a certain string of Oriental pearls, valued at 16,000 pounds, to a young lady in London," the prosecutor began. "He was anxious to fill this request, and as soon as the ship docked, went into the City with the pearls. It appears that upon his route to deliver them, he went into the shop of the prisoner at the bar to be shaved, and no one ever saw him again."
The captain of the ship and a friend of the dead man retraced his route to the city when he failed to show up, and questioned Todd. Sweeney admitted shaving the sailor but said he completed the job and Thornhill went on his way. Col. Jeffrey, the friend of Thornhill remained in London after the ship sailed to Bristol, sure that the string of pearls would soon show up.
"Gentlemen, it did," the prosecutor continued. "It appeared at the Hammersmith residence of Mr. John Mundel who lent money upon securities and it will be deposed that one evening the prisoner at the bar went to this Mr. Mundel and pawned a string of pearls for one thousand pounds."
Describing in graphic details the scene beneath St. Dunstan's Church, the attorney general revealed some of the more horrifying facts of the case of the Demon Barber. "Almost every vault was full of the fresh remains of the dead. (Sir Richard) found that into old coffins, the tenants of which had mouldered to dust, there had been thrust fresh bodies, with scarcely any flesh remaining on them - yet sufficient to produce the stench in the church".
The prosecutor then went on to describe the connecting tunnel between Fleet Street and Bell Yard, and then tied it all together with the evidence found in Sweeney Todd's shop.
"Sweeney Todd's house was found crammed with property and clothing sufficient for 160 people," he said to the stunned courtroom. "Yes, gentlemen of the jury, I said 160 people, and among all that clothing was found a piece of jacket which will be sworn to have belonged to Francis Thornhill."
There was still more evidence, the prosecutor said.
"Is a piece of sleeve enough to convict a man? Wisely, the law says no and looks for the body of a murdered man," he said confidently. "We will produce that proof. For among the skeletons found contiguous to Todd's premises was one which will be sworn to as being that of the deceased Mr. Thornhill."
Colonel William Jeffrey took the stand for the prosecution and told how he had gone in search of Thornhill, and how he later sought the help of the Bow Street Runners. He descended into the catacomb with Sir Richard and a doctor, who removed a bone from a skeleton they found there. Jeffery made his mark upon the bone for identification.
Next up for the prosecution was its star witness, the hero of the hour, Sir Richard Blunt. He told of how the rumors of Sweeney Todd had been brought to his attention and how he had linked Todd with the stench of St. Dunstan's. "After careful inquiry, I found that out of 13 disappearances, no less than ten had declared their intention to get shaved, or their hair dressed, or to go through some process which required them to visit a barber.
"My attention was directed to the peculiar odour in the church and from that moment, I, in my own mind, connected it with Sweeney Todd and the disappearances of the persons who had so unaccountably been lost in the immediate neighborhood of Fleet Street. And in the midst of this, I had formal application made to me concerning the disappearance of Mr. Francis Thornhill, who had been clearly traced to the shop of the prisoner at the bar and never seen by anyone to leave it."
The final witness for the prosecution was Dr. Sylvester Steers, who identified the leg bone found beneath Todd's shop as one belonging to Thornhill. How did he come to this conclusion, the prosecutor asked.
"Mr. Thornhill met with a very unusual and painful accident," the doctor replied. "The external condyle or projection on the outer end of the thighbone, which makes part of the knee joint, was broken off, and there was a diagonal fracture about three inches higher upon the bone. I had the sole care of the case, and although a cure was effected, it was not without considerable distortion of the bone."
"From my frequent examination I was perfectly well acquainted with the case, and I can swear that the bone in the hands of the jury was the one so broken to which I attended."
Forensic evidence such as this had never before been produced in a court trial, and the question of whether the jury, educated men though they might be, would accept it. The evidence of Todd's guilt was certainly apparent if circumstantial evidence was to be believed. The job of the prosecutor would have been made so much easier if Mrs. Lovett had only been alive to testify.
Now it was the defense's turn to address the jury. The defense counsel, appointed by the court to serve the Demon Barber, quickly went to the bizarre and circumstantial nature of the case against Sweeney Todd. To be sure, establishing innocence in the face of such hatred that the spectators felt for Sweeney Todd would be difficult, at best. But the defense counsel, whose name remains shrouded by the mists of time, gave it his all.
"Instead of evidence, near or remote fixing the deed upon him, we have nothing but long stories about vaults, bad odours in churches, moveable floorboards, chairs standing on their heads, secret passages and pork pies," he began. "Really, gentlemen of the jury, I do think that the manner in which the prosecution has been got up against my virtuous and pious client is an outrage to your common sense."
He then attacked the prosecution's pieces of evidence one by one. First, how could the disappearance of respectable men from their homes have anything to do with Sweeney Todd, he asked. Then, answering his own question, he said "We are told that the respectable men want to get shaved, and that Sir Richard Blunt had a shave several times at my client's shop, yet here he is quite alive and well to give evidence today, and no one will say that Sir Richard is not a respectable man."
And what about the smell in St. Dunstan's? "You might as well say that my client committed felony because this court was not well ventilated!"
The most serious evidence against Sweeney Todd was the disappearance of Francis Thornhill. "Really, this is too bad. Hundreds of people may have seen him come out - and no doubt did so - but they happened not to know him. So just because no one passed the time of day with this man, my client is declared guilty of murder."
As for the bone, the barrister held no account of forensic evidence. "Gentlemen of the jury, what would you think of a man who should produce a brick and swear that it belonged to a certain house?"
Calling the prosecution's case "sophistry" he questioned the death of Margery Lovett. He placed the blame for the murders squarely on her shoulders and said that she accused Sweeney Todd, "a man well-known for his benevolence and piety," out of spite. Then declining to call any witnesses for the defense, he rested his case.
The judge quickly summed up the case for the jury. In the tradition of the time, his summation amounted to almost a restatement of the prosecution's case against Sweeney Todd. Then, he charged the jury to determine the guilt or innocence of the Demon Barber.
The next phase of the trial, deliberation and sentencing, took less than 10 minutes. The jury retired to consider the details of the case and returned a guilty verdict after five minutes. The judge, placing a black cloth atop his white wig, asked Sweeney Todd if he had any words before sentence was passed.
"I am not guilty!" Todd shouted.
"It is now my painful duty to pass upon you the sentence of the law, which is that you be taken from here to a place of execution and hanged by the neck until dead. May Heaven have mercy upon you.
"You cannot expect that society can do otherwise than put out of life someone who, like yourself, has been a terror and a scourge."
On January 25, 1802, in the prison yard at Newgate, Sweeney Todd was strung up on the gallows before a crowd of thousands, where he apparently "died hard." After his execution, his body was given over to a handful of learned "barber-surgeons" where it was dissected. Sweeney Todd ended up, like so many of his victims, as a pile of meat and bones.
Not long after Sweeney Todd was filleted by the barber-surgeons, the nascent pulp fiction market took hold of his story and, as fiction writers do, began to embellish it somewhat. The first stories that appeared in the one-cent "penny dreadfuls" - the popular true-crime reports of the day - were filled with ghastly accounts of a sub-human monster who used a barber chair and trapdoor to lure unsuspecting clients to their doom.
So-called "Newgate novels," stories with a moralistic turn, which demonstrated the folly of a life of crime, had been popular with the British public since the first true crime report appeared in 1776. That work, The Annals of Newgate, or the Malefactors Register, was prepared at the request of His Majesty's government by the Newgate chaplain and was immensely popular with the masses. Later came The Newgate Calendar, or the Malefactors Bloody Register, which highlighted the crimes of such notables as "Moll Cutpurse, master thief," "Daniel Davis, dishonest postman," Mary Carlton, a.k.a., "The German Princess, adventuress" and "Charles Fox, an offending dustman." Almost everyone in the Newgate Calendar ended up on the gallows.
The stories were often serialized to ensure repeat customers, and were enhanced to provide melodramatic aspects missing in the true account of the case. One of the most popular stories of Sweeney Todd created a love interest for the hapless apprentice. The String of Pearls," by Thomas Peckett Prest, became immensely popular and was quickly adapted for the stage by George Dibdin-Pitt for performance at the Britannia Theatre.
Actors recreate Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett for the stage
For centuries after his demise, Sweeney Todd was reincarnated on British stages around the country, much to the delight of the masses. Most plays were based on Prest's String of Pearls in some form or another, but the villains remained either Sweeney Todd, or in some cases, Margery Lovett.
With the invention of motion pictures, it was only natural that the Demon Barber would move to the screen. His first appearance in film was in a 1920s silent film version of String of Pearls. Haining reports that although no prints of the film remain, the movie, entitled simply Sweeney Todd, was a romantic comedy. Two years later, a serious horror film of Sweeney Todd was produced and in 1936, the Demon Barber had his first speaking role.
One of the main characters of String of Pearls was Tobias, Todd's apprentice, who was apparently modeled after the poor child whom Todd had committed to the asylum. In Pit's play, Tobias escapes thanks to the gin-drunk guards and returns to Fleet Street to avenge himself, expose the villain, capture the string of pearls and win the girl.
Sweeney Todd received a huge boost to his popularity with the creation of Stephen Sondheim's musical thriller, Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street," which combines some of Pit's version of String of Pearls with a touch of black humor.
In Sondheim's play, Sweeney Todd is the alias of a man wrongfully accused of a crime and transported to Australia. The barber returns to Fleet Street, only to find that his wife and daughter have disappeared. His wife, the target of the lust of a judge, was driven to insanity, while his daughter was adopted by the judge out of a sense of remorse.
Todd meets up with Mrs. Lovett, who makes "the worst pies in London" and together they plot his revenge against the judge and a Beadle who assisted the judge in his nefarious plans. Made mad by his anger, Sweeney Todd begins killing as many of his customers as possible, which Mrs. Lovett uses for her pies.
Anthony, the hero of the play, falls in love with the ward of the judge, and is determined to reveal the heinous crimes of Sweeney Todd. In classic tragic formula, Sweeney Todd's desire for revenge proves to be his undoing.
The play premiered on Broadway with Angela Lansbury taking the role of Mrs. Lovett and Len Cariou as the Demon Barber. Sweeney Todd was directed by Harold Prince. It won a slew of Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book, Best Music, and Best Actor and Actress awards. The musical also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical. Across the ocean, the musical premiered a year later and won Best Musical Award from the London Standard Drama Awards, and the Society of West End Theatre Awards for best musical and best actor in a musical.
But it is in the streets and playgrounds were Sweeney Todd is best remembered. Anywhere children gather to tell spooky stories and scare each other, the legend of Sweeney Todd is sure to delight. As Anna Pavord of the London Observer wrote in 1979, "Sweeney Todd will never die. We all need bogeymen and he was bogier than most."
Bibliography
Haining, Peter. 1993. Sweeney Todd: The Real Story of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. London: Robson Books.
Jeffers, H. Paul. 1992. Bloody Business: An Anecdotal History of Scotland Yard. New York: Barnes and Noble Books.
Nef, John U. 1943. "The Industrial Revolution Reconsidered." Journal of Economic History. Volume 3:1.
Raynor, J.L and G.T. Crook. 1926. The Complete Newgate Calendar. London: The Navarre Society.
Sondheim, Stephen and Hugh Wheeler. 1979 Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers.
Wilson, Colin. 2000. The Mammoth Book of the History of Murder. London: Carroll & Graf.
Zito, George V. 1972. "A Note on the Population of Seventeenth Century London." Demography. Volume 9:3.
Sweeney Todd's accomplice is even more shrouded in mystery than the murderous barber himself. Her surname was undoubtedly Lovett, but whether her first name was Margery or Sarah remains a mystery. Haining argues in favor of Margery, as most of the articles written about her use that name. She was less than beautiful, according to articles written at the time of her arrest, and her smile came not from her heart, but was as false as the veal filling in her pies.
Mrs. Lovett was a widow, whose first husband had died under mysterious circumstances and no one was ever able to place her in Sweeney Todd's presence in public. The pair were lovers, though, and apparently their passions were fulfilled after a successful murder and butchering job. She liked the finer things in life, considered herself better than her working class background, and used her portion of the profits to furnish silk sheets and fine furniture in her apartment above her Bell Yard bakery.
How she met Sweeney Todd is a mystery, but apparently he set her up in her shop in Bell Yard. He had been busy "polishing off" - Sweeney's own play on words - his customers for some time before he brought Mrs. Lovett into the act. Until she started using his victims in her meat pies, Todd had been using the abandoned crypts beneath St. Dunstan's church to hide his handiwork. There, he managed to store the bodies amid the dozens of family crypts that time had all but forgotten. But he was running out of room and needed a new way to dispose of his murder victims.
Thomas Peckett Prest was the first author to write the tale of Sweeney Todd and Margery Lovett shortly after their arrest and trial. He had worked on Fleet Street and was familiar with Lovett's two-story pie shop. In the basement of the shop was the bakery, and a false wall could be opened to reveal the catacombs behind. It was through this false wall that Todd would apparently deliver his ghastly pie fillings. Prest described the shop this way: "On the left side of Bell Yard, going down from Carey Street, was, at the time we write of, one of the most celebrated shops for the sale of veal and pork pies that London had ever produced. High and low, rich and poor, resorted to it; its fame had spread far and wide; and at twelve o'clock every day when the first batch of pies was sold there was a tremendous rush to obtain them.
"Oh, those delicious pies," wrote Prest (who probably sampled one or two in his time). "There was about them a flavour never surpassed and rarely equaled; the paste was of the most delicate construction, and impregnated with the aroma of delicious gravy that defied description."
Barbers in Sweeney Todd's day were more than just hair-cutters and shavers. Their trade extended into all sorts of medicinal acts, and a sick person was just as likely to seek treatment from a barber as from a doctor. All that anatomy training came in handy for Sweeney Todd, who having dumped a victim from his barber chair, would race down to the basement with just a dim oil lamp to guide him and proceed to process the victim for disposal.
First, Todd would strip the valuables from the body - taking time to slit the victim's throat if necessary - and then he would remove the deceased's clothing. Working quickly to avoid the problems associated with rigor mortis, Sweeney Todd would disjoint the limbs and sever them from the body, taking time to remove the skin, which was unusable for pies. Then, in the dank cavern, in just the flickering light of his oil lamps and candles, Todd would gut his poor victim like a hunter dresses a deer. All of the meat would be stripped from the bones, which he would pile off to the side, and the vital organs that would be ground up for pie fillings and the fresh meat would be boxed for delivery to Mrs. Lovett. The bones he would scatter amid the remains in the catacombs, where they were virtually indistinguishable from the bodies of persons who had died a more natural death.
No one believes that Mrs. Lovett was solely responsible for baking her renowned meat pies. A 1924 account states that she had a hired girl and a male pie maker who helped with the preparation. It was unlikely that either of them suspected where Mrs. Lovett's meat supply came from, and C.W. Biller, in that 1924 biography, asserts that anyone who began to suspect "they, too, became pie filling."
St. Dunstan's was old and musty, but the smell, which permeated the church and sacristy, was putrid beyond comprehension. They had been burying people in the catacombs there for hundreds of years, and never before had the smell of decay and death been so prevalent. It got so bad that ladies attending the services would require a handkerchief scented with vinegar or perfume in order to sit through the services, and the parson himself was reported to "sneeze in the midst of discourse and to hold to his pious mouth a handkerchief, in which was some strong and pungent essence, for the purpose of trying to overcome the effluvia."
The matter went on for some months before anyone thought to contact the authorities to investigate. At first the church leaders were afraid that some sort of disease was rampant in the facility, and they contacted the London health department (such as it was in the 18th century), but a study of the parishioners and others nearby found no more deaths or sicknesses than normal. At their wits' end, the church fathers sought the help of the Bow Street Runners to begin an investigation. The Beadle of St. Dunstan's, known to history only as "Mr. Otton", was also a constable for the Runners and he took the matter to his chief, Sir Richard Blunt, who had taken charge of the police force after the death of Henry Fielding.
The smell, Otton told Blunt, reminded him of the smell of rotting corpses, but no one had been buried in St. Dunstan's in many years, and the catacombs below the church had been adequately sealed. Blunt and Otton launched an investigation, descending into the bowels of the church and inspecting the vaults they found there. None had been disturbed, although the stench was much stronger in the crypt. The sewers, which ran near the church, were also scrutinized, and they were found to be in working order and not leaking offal into the church. Blunt left the church with a firmer understanding of the problem, but with no idea what the cause might be.
Another Runner was to provide the link between Sweeney Todd and the mysterious stench of St. Dunstan's Church. It seemed that the rumors of the mysterious disappearances of several sailors who vanished after seeking a polishing off at Sweeney's barbershop had started the gossips' tongues wagging, and the constable dutifully reported the chit-chat to Blunt. Sir Richard didn't immediately put Todd together with the smell, but employing the now-common police technique of records investigation, Blunt found that Sweeney Todd had once been accused of theft of a pair of silver shoe buckles. The case had not stood up because the buckles were of a fairly common sort, but the woman who charged the barber with the theft was adamant that her husband, who had mysteriously disappeared one day, had worn the exact same buckles on his shoes.
Sir Richard was savvy enough to assume that where there is smoke, there is fire, and he put Todd's shop under a close watch. In typical bureaucratic fashion, Sir Richard reported his suspicions to his superiors and was given the green light to "use whatever means might be necessary" to solve the mystery. Over the next several months, three Runners watching Sweeney's barbershop reported that men had entered the store for a shave or haircut and had not been seen to leave. Sir Richard became more convinced that Todd was murdering clients, and that somehow, St. Dunstan's Church was involved. He decided to revisit the vaults, this time with a crew of Bow Street's finest, to get to the bottom of the issue.
Armed with just a compass, walking stick, and oil lanterns, the men descended once again into the fetid stench of the church's crypt. After a few moments of searching they stumbled across the crypt of the Weston family, which had been one of the Demon Barber's favorite dumping grounds. What they found there was reported in the newspapers in gruesome detail: "Piled one upon each other and reaching halfway up to the ceiling, lay a decomposing mass of human remains. Heaped one upon another heedlessly tossed into the disgusting heap any way, lay pieces of gaunt skeletons with pieces of flesh here and there only adhering to the bones. Heads in a similar state of decay were tumbled about, the whole enough to strike such horror into the heart of any man," wrote the Courier in its account of Sweeney Todd's trial.
Coming to the horrible realization that they had finally located the source of the stench, the Bow Street Runners pressed on, following bloodstained footprints until they disappeared at the back of a shop, apparently on Bell Yard. Sir Richard, who was known as an acute thinker, realized that Sweeney Todd was murdering his clients, and what was worse, he was disposing of the evidence by serving the meat in a pie.
But still more evidence was needed. There was thought to be no way to identify the remains found in the Weston crypt, and no way to tie the murders to Sweeney Todd and Margery Lovett, save for the gossips on Fleet Street. The Runners would have to move quickly, yet carefully, lest a blatant investigation scare the murderous duo away. There was no requirement for a search warrant at the time, and Sir Richard ordered his men to accompany every customer into Sweeney Todd's barbershop to keep him from practicing his macabre craft until a Runner had a chance to search his apartment for more evidence. Undoubtedly, for the next several days, the Bow Street Runners were the most neatly shaved police force in the world as they kept tabs on the Demon Barber. The chance to search the house came two days after the discoveries beneath the church, and the Runner dispatched to the house was able to locate a veritable treasure trove of booty from Sweeney Todd's apartment. He noted the names and initials found in some of the clothing and jewelry and reported in to Sir Richard.
Wasting no more time, Blunt dispatched a group of Runners to arrest Margery Lovett, and set out with another squad to pick up Sweeney Todd. The arrest of Mrs. Lovett was not without incident. When the Runners arrived at her shop, she was serving some of her ever-present customers and as they learned the horrid contents of their delicious meals, they attempted to lynch Margery Lovett.
"The people who were in the shop spread the news all over the neighbourhood and the place was soon jammed up with a maddened mob. They poured from Fleet Street and Carey Street determined to tear her to bits and hang her on the lamp post in the middle of Bell Yard," reports an anonymous author in an 1878 version of Sweeney Todd's life.
The Runners were able to hurry Mrs. Lovett away in a waiting carriage, and she was taken to a cell in Newgate Prison.
Blunt's arrest of Sweeney Todd, on the other hand, went without incident. The barber was alone in his shop when the Bow Street Runners entered and clapped the handcuffs, or darbies, on the Demon Barber. He was already behind bars in Newgate Prison before any civilians knew he was involved in the horror of Bell Yard.
Even in a sprawling city like London, news about the goings-on in Bell Yard and Fleet Street spread rapidly by word-of-mouth. The street outside Sweeney Todd's shop was soon packed with the curious and the vengeful, and Bell Yard, which served as a pass-through for lawyers on their way to the court buildings nearby, was made impassable by the sheer number of gawkers who came to peer in the windows of Margery Lovett's once popular pie shop.
The newspapers of the time had a field day with the story, reporting rumors and fact with equal zeal. Sir Richard was considered a hero by the people, and as he continued to gather evidence for the upcoming trial, interest in the work of the Bow Street Runners was diverting much of his attention.
Margery Lovett had wasted no time in confessing her sins to the governor of Newgate Prison. She revealed the entire plot and Sweeney Todd's role in it, "believing herself on the edge of the grave" and wishing to come clean before she was hanged. It was clear by her confession that she intended to take Sweeney Todd with her when she swung from the gallows. But Margery Lovett was to cheat the hangman, and nearly squash the Crown's case against the demon barber.
Acting in the dual role of police and prosecutor, Sir Richard was stunned in December 1801 when he was advised that Mrs. Lovett had poisoned herself in her cell at Newgate. How she came by the poison is unknown, but as a woman of means she might have been able to bribe a jailer, and authorities learned that she had had a delivery of some clothes from her home shortly before she died. Haining surmises that Lovett might have had poison hidden away in the clothes for just such a situation.
London was abuzz as the trial of Sweeney Todd approached in December 1801. "Scarcely ever in London has such an amount of public excitement been produced by any criminal proceedings as by the trial of Sweeney Todd," wrote the Daily Courant. "So great is the excitement that sober-minded men, who do not see any peculiar interest in the sayings and doings of a great criminal, are disgusted that the popular taste should run that way.
"Be that as it may, the case of Rex v. Sweeney Todd will certainly be one of the trials of the age."
That prescient prediction by the newspaper was held to be true as the trial opened. Sweeney Todd had not been told of the death of Margery Lovett prior to his trial, and when he was informed, he apparently turned pale, "like some great, gaunt ghost."
Todd was actually on trial for just one murder, that a seaman, Francis Thornhill. Despite the large number of bodies and the mountain of evidence found at his home, police could scarcely identify any other victims. Sir Richard had rightly surmised that although the barber was a mass murderer, one slaying would be sufficient to send him to the gallows.
Dressed in a red gown, chain, and white peruke, the attorney general, representing King George III, opened his case. A reporter for the Newgate Calender - the long-serving recorder of criminal behavior in England - dutifully took down the statements.
"Mr. Thornhill had been commissioned to take a certain string of Oriental pearls, valued at 16,000 pounds, to a young lady in London," the prosecutor began. "He was anxious to fill this request, and as soon as the ship docked, went into the City with the pearls. It appears that upon his route to deliver them, he went into the shop of the prisoner at the bar to be shaved, and no one ever saw him again."
The captain of the ship and a friend of the dead man retraced his route to the city when he failed to show up, and questioned Todd. Sweeney admitted shaving the sailor but said he completed the job and Thornhill went on his way. Col. Jeffrey, the friend of Thornhill remained in London after the ship sailed to Bristol, sure that the string of pearls would soon show up.
"Gentlemen, it did," the prosecutor continued. "It appeared at the Hammersmith residence of Mr. John Mundel who lent money upon securities and it will be deposed that one evening the prisoner at the bar went to this Mr. Mundel and pawned a string of pearls for one thousand pounds."
Describing in graphic details the scene beneath St. Dunstan's Church, the attorney general revealed some of the more horrifying facts of the case of the Demon Barber. "Almost every vault was full of the fresh remains of the dead. (Sir Richard) found that into old coffins, the tenants of which had mouldered to dust, there had been thrust fresh bodies, with scarcely any flesh remaining on them - yet sufficient to produce the stench in the church".
The prosecutor then went on to describe the connecting tunnel between Fleet Street and Bell Yard, and then tied it all together with the evidence found in Sweeney Todd's shop.
"Sweeney Todd's house was found crammed with property and clothing sufficient for 160 people," he said to the stunned courtroom. "Yes, gentlemen of the jury, I said 160 people, and among all that clothing was found a piece of jacket which will be sworn to have belonged to Francis Thornhill."
There was still more evidence, the prosecutor said.
"Is a piece of sleeve enough to convict a man? Wisely, the law says no and looks for the body of a murdered man," he said confidently. "We will produce that proof. For among the skeletons found contiguous to Todd's premises was one which will be sworn to as being that of the deceased Mr. Thornhill."
Colonel William Jeffrey took the stand for the prosecution and told how he had gone in search of Thornhill, and how he later sought the help of the Bow Street Runners. He descended into the catacomb with Sir Richard and a doctor, who removed a bone from a skeleton they found there. Jeffery made his mark upon the bone for identification.
Next up for the prosecution was its star witness, the hero of the hour, Sir Richard Blunt. He told of how the rumors of Sweeney Todd had been brought to his attention and how he had linked Todd with the stench of St. Dunstan's. "After careful inquiry, I found that out of 13 disappearances, no less than ten had declared their intention to get shaved, or their hair dressed, or to go through some process which required them to visit a barber.
"My attention was directed to the peculiar odour in the church and from that moment, I, in my own mind, connected it with Sweeney Todd and the disappearances of the persons who had so unaccountably been lost in the immediate neighborhood of Fleet Street. And in the midst of this, I had formal application made to me concerning the disappearance of Mr. Francis Thornhill, who had been clearly traced to the shop of the prisoner at the bar and never seen by anyone to leave it."
The final witness for the prosecution was Dr. Sylvester Steers, who identified the leg bone found beneath Todd's shop as one belonging to Thornhill. How did he come to this conclusion, the prosecutor asked.
"Mr. Thornhill met with a very unusual and painful accident," the doctor replied. "The external condyle or projection on the outer end of the thighbone, which makes part of the knee joint, was broken off, and there was a diagonal fracture about three inches higher upon the bone. I had the sole care of the case, and although a cure was effected, it was not without considerable distortion of the bone."
"From my frequent examination I was perfectly well acquainted with the case, and I can swear that the bone in the hands of the jury was the one so broken to which I attended."
Forensic evidence such as this had never before been produced in a court trial, and the question of whether the jury, educated men though they might be, would accept it. The evidence of Todd's guilt was certainly apparent if circumstantial evidence was to be believed. The job of the prosecutor would have been made so much easier if Mrs. Lovett had only been alive to testify.
Now it was the defense's turn to address the jury. The defense counsel, appointed by the court to serve the Demon Barber, quickly went to the bizarre and circumstantial nature of the case against Sweeney Todd. To be sure, establishing innocence in the face of such hatred that the spectators felt for Sweeney Todd would be difficult, at best. But the defense counsel, whose name remains shrouded by the mists of time, gave it his all.
"Instead of evidence, near or remote fixing the deed upon him, we have nothing but long stories about vaults, bad odours in churches, moveable floorboards, chairs standing on their heads, secret passages and pork pies," he began. "Really, gentlemen of the jury, I do think that the manner in which the prosecution has been got up against my virtuous and pious client is an outrage to your common sense."
He then attacked the prosecution's pieces of evidence one by one. First, how could the disappearance of respectable men from their homes have anything to do with Sweeney Todd, he asked. Then, answering his own question, he said "We are told that the respectable men want to get shaved, and that Sir Richard Blunt had a shave several times at my client's shop, yet here he is quite alive and well to give evidence today, and no one will say that Sir Richard is not a respectable man."
And what about the smell in St. Dunstan's? "You might as well say that my client committed felony because this court was not well ventilated!"
The most serious evidence against Sweeney Todd was the disappearance of Francis Thornhill. "Really, this is too bad. Hundreds of people may have seen him come out - and no doubt did so - but they happened not to know him. So just because no one passed the time of day with this man, my client is declared guilty of murder."
As for the bone, the barrister held no account of forensic evidence. "Gentlemen of the jury, what would you think of a man who should produce a brick and swear that it belonged to a certain house?"
Calling the prosecution's case "sophistry" he questioned the death of Margery Lovett. He placed the blame for the murders squarely on her shoulders and said that she accused Sweeney Todd, "a man well-known for his benevolence and piety," out of spite. Then declining to call any witnesses for the defense, he rested his case.
The judge quickly summed up the case for the jury. In the tradition of the time, his summation amounted to almost a restatement of the prosecution's case against Sweeney Todd. Then, he charged the jury to determine the guilt or innocence of the Demon Barber.
The next phase of the trial, deliberation and sentencing, took less than 10 minutes. The jury retired to consider the details of the case and returned a guilty verdict after five minutes. The judge, placing a black cloth atop his white wig, asked Sweeney Todd if he had any words before sentence was passed.
"I am not guilty!" Todd shouted.
"It is now my painful duty to pass upon you the sentence of the law, which is that you be taken from here to a place of execution and hanged by the neck until dead. May Heaven have mercy upon you.
"You cannot expect that society can do otherwise than put out of life someone who, like yourself, has been a terror and a scourge."
On January 25, 1802, in the prison yard at Newgate, Sweeney Todd was strung up on the gallows before a crowd of thousands, where he apparently "died hard." After his execution, his body was given over to a handful of learned "barber-surgeons" where it was dissected. Sweeney Todd ended up, like so many of his victims, as a pile of meat and bones.
Not long after Sweeney Todd was filleted by the barber-surgeons, the nascent pulp fiction market took hold of his story and, as fiction writers do, began to embellish it somewhat. The first stories that appeared in the one-cent "penny dreadfuls" - the popular true-crime reports of the day - were filled with ghastly accounts of a sub-human monster who used a barber chair and trapdoor to lure unsuspecting clients to their doom.
So-called "Newgate novels," stories with a moralistic turn, which demonstrated the folly of a life of crime, had been popular with the British public since the first true crime report appeared in 1776. That work, The Annals of Newgate, or the Malefactors Register, was prepared at the request of His Majesty's government by the Newgate chaplain and was immensely popular with the masses. Later came The Newgate Calendar, or the Malefactors Bloody Register, which highlighted the crimes of such notables as "Moll Cutpurse, master thief," "Daniel Davis, dishonest postman," Mary Carlton, a.k.a., "The German Princess, adventuress" and "Charles Fox, an offending dustman." Almost everyone in the Newgate Calendar ended up on the gallows.
The stories were often serialized to ensure repeat customers, and were enhanced to provide melodramatic aspects missing in the true account of the case. One of the most popular stories of Sweeney Todd created a love interest for the hapless apprentice. The String of Pearls," by Thomas Peckett Prest, became immensely popular and was quickly adapted for the stage by George Dibdin-Pitt for performance at the Britannia Theatre.
Actors recreate Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett for the stage
For centuries after his demise, Sweeney Todd was reincarnated on British stages around the country, much to the delight of the masses. Most plays were based on Prest's String of Pearls in some form or another, but the villains remained either Sweeney Todd, or in some cases, Margery Lovett.
With the invention of motion pictures, it was only natural that the Demon Barber would move to the screen. His first appearance in film was in a 1920s silent film version of String of Pearls. Haining reports that although no prints of the film remain, the movie, entitled simply Sweeney Todd, was a romantic comedy. Two years later, a serious horror film of Sweeney Todd was produced and in 1936, the Demon Barber had his first speaking role.
One of the main characters of String of Pearls was Tobias, Todd's apprentice, who was apparently modeled after the poor child whom Todd had committed to the asylum. In Pit's play, Tobias escapes thanks to the gin-drunk guards and returns to Fleet Street to avenge himself, expose the villain, capture the string of pearls and win the girl.
Sweeney Todd received a huge boost to his popularity with the creation of Stephen Sondheim's musical thriller, Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street," which combines some of Pit's version of String of Pearls with a touch of black humor.
In Sondheim's play, Sweeney Todd is the alias of a man wrongfully accused of a crime and transported to Australia. The barber returns to Fleet Street, only to find that his wife and daughter have disappeared. His wife, the target of the lust of a judge, was driven to insanity, while his daughter was adopted by the judge out of a sense of remorse.
Todd meets up with Mrs. Lovett, who makes "the worst pies in London" and together they plot his revenge against the judge and a Beadle who assisted the judge in his nefarious plans. Made mad by his anger, Sweeney Todd begins killing as many of his customers as possible, which Mrs. Lovett uses for her pies.
Anthony, the hero of the play, falls in love with the ward of the judge, and is determined to reveal the heinous crimes of Sweeney Todd. In classic tragic formula, Sweeney Todd's desire for revenge proves to be his undoing.
The play premiered on Broadway with Angela Lansbury taking the role of Mrs. Lovett and Len Cariou as the Demon Barber. Sweeney Todd was directed by Harold Prince. It won a slew of Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book, Best Music, and Best Actor and Actress awards. The musical also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical. Across the ocean, the musical premiered a year later and won Best Musical Award from the London Standard Drama Awards, and the Society of West End Theatre Awards for best musical and best actor in a musical.
But it is in the streets and playgrounds were Sweeney Todd is best remembered. Anywhere children gather to tell spooky stories and scare each other, the legend of Sweeney Todd is sure to delight. As Anna Pavord of the London Observer wrote in 1979, "Sweeney Todd will never die. We all need bogeymen and he was bogier than most."
Bibliography
Haining, Peter. 1993. Sweeney Todd: The Real Story of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. London: Robson Books.
Jeffers, H. Paul. 1992. Bloody Business: An Anecdotal History of Scotland Yard. New York: Barnes and Noble Books.
Nef, John U. 1943. "The Industrial Revolution Reconsidered." Journal of Economic History. Volume 3:1.
Raynor, J.L and G.T. Crook. 1926. The Complete Newgate Calendar. London: The Navarre Society.
Sondheim, Stephen and Hugh Wheeler. 1979 Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers.
Wilson, Colin. 2000. The Mammoth Book of the History of Murder. London: Carroll & Graf.
Zito, George V. 1972. "A Note on the Population of Seventeenth Century London." Demography. Volume 9:3.