ABSTRACT
The murderous barber Sweeney Todd and his pastry-chef accomplice Mrs Lovett made their first appearances in fiction long before Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street first appeared on Broadway in 1979. 'The throat that gleams' is a nod to the eponymous string of pearls under which the legend of Sweeney Todd used to play on the London stage. Robert Mack, who has written a thorough and fascinating history of the legend of Sweeney Todd, offers two serious candidates for the original author of The String of Pearls. Authorship of The String of Pearls is disputed and possibly even irrecoverable. The demon barber was always a murderous, unhinged maniac with a disturbingly creepy laugh. By the 1870s his play was being subtitled The Barber Fiend, and he is compared to the devil himself in Frederick Hazleton's version. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
