After viewing Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) yesterday, I headed over to Wikipedia to read up on the origins of the Sweeney Todd character. He first showed up in a penny dreadful beginning in 1846.

Mildly titled “The String of Pearls: A Romance”, it was published serially over the course of 18 weeks. There is some confusion over who the author was:

It was probably written by James Malcolm Rymer, though Thomas Peckett Prest has also been credited with it. Other attributions include Edward P. Hingston, George MacFarren and Albert Richard Smith.

Whoever wrote it, the full original text is available online at the spiffy Victorian Dictionary site. A sample from Chapter One: The Strange Customer at Sweeney Todd’s.

The barber himself was a long, low-jointed, ill-put-together sort of fellow, with an immense mouth, and such huge hands and feet, that he was, in his way, quite a natural curiosity; and, what was more wonderful, considering his trade, there never was seen such a head of hair as Sweeney Todd’s. We know not what to compare it to: probably it came nearest to what one might suppose to be the appearance of a thickset hedge, in which a quantity of small wire had got entangled. In truth, it was a most terrific head of hair; and as Sweeney Todd kept all his combs in it – some said his scissors likewise – when he put his head out of the shop-door to see what sort of weather it was, he might have been mistaken for some Indian warrior with a very remarkable head-dress.