After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Dark Truth About Sweeney Todd

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

Sweeney Todd - the demon barber of Fleet Street who beheads people and then sends their bodies through a trapdoor to be made into pies. It's just a story right? Right? There's not any real history to it....or is there? Like two food inspectors examining a particularly noxious looking pie, Maddy and Anthony dig into the dark truths that led to Sweeney Todd's creations.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. Research was by Phoebe Joyce. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The bell above the door jangles as a gentleman steps inside, the warm, steamy air of the barber shop closing around him like a cloak. The room smells of bay rum and singed hair, the quiet scrape of steel on leather the only sound. The barber doesn't speak as he gestures the man into the chair. just fixes him with a steady, unreadable look. The client sits, feeling the cracked leather sigh beneath him and tilting his chin as instructed.

The barber's hands are practised, almost tender as he lathers the client's throat, but then comes the razor, gleaming, honed to a terrifying edge that catches the gas lamp light. It hovers. then touches skin. In that instant, every whispered fear of Victorian London rushes in.

Vanishings, rumours, and the legend of a barber who never meant for his customers to walk out again. London in the 1840s was a city of shadows, packed slums, grinding poverty, and a public hungry for blood-soaked tales. Crime broadside sold like hot pies, splashing streets with lurid stories of murder, cannibalism and vice. Into this world stepped Sweeney Todd, the demonic barber who slit throats for profit and sent bodies tumbling below. A tale born from fear, sharpened by sensationalism and fed by the city's darkest instincts. This is the story that shaped the legend, the real anxieties, brutal realities and gory imagination that made Sweeney Todd impossible to forget. From the basement of a barbershop, this is After Dark.

is a tale that we know most likely from a film or a musical. Which we are not allowed to sing for licensing reasons. Well, I wasn't going to. Are we not allowed to for that? Oh, you're just made it up. No, I think you are not allowed to sing it unless you are doing a review of it. Okay. It's a very good musical.

Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd. Sweeney Todd is what we're doing. And it is a very good musical, actually. The Demon Barver of Fleet Street. But is there a chilling original history behind this story? What are the fears of the time that made this story a sensation? And what pies are really made out of wait? And were pies really that popular?

I mean, I'm going to say yes to that. I don't know anything about this as your episode. I know a pie. Do you like a pie? If I had to do a pie, it would be a chicken pie. I make a mean chicken pie. That's like my go-to, like, cozy comfort food. And, you know, I'm married to a northerner, so he loves a pie.

You got to have a pie. Hi. But, no, it's not for me. Shane does not speak like that. No. Well, he doesn't actually not. Maybe he does at home. No, no, he doesn't.

Why? It would be so funny if he was putting on more. Anyway, look, we have a lot to go through. Give me, oh, we're in the 1840s. Can I just say before we went on there, I was like, Anthony, there's so much information in this you need to keep me on track. And this is now his job, so you need to all spot the amounts of times. I like that tells me to shut up and move on.

And also how unsuttle I am with that. Stop, we stop in the middle of a sentence and keep moving. And we still haven't moved. It says the 1840s, I think, but that musical did not come out in the 1840s, but I presume we're talking about the actual original story. We are talking about the original story. So we're in the 1840s slash the 1850s. Okay, this is a broad time.

This is an age, as you will know, Dr. Anthony Delaney, of cheap print media. When reading of smoking. No, usually when people call me Dr. Anthony Delaney, they're taking a piss or something. It's just like, well, which you were, actually. So yes. I mean, you did earn it. So there's a kind of explosion in print media where it becomes more popular

with the middling and the lower classes, the working classes. People are consuming news, but also stories, fiction, like never before. Things are being churned out. We're going to talk about some of those publications and what they might look like a little bit. But reading aloud is also becoming popular.

So literacy rates in 1840s, England, are increasing. There is a gender literacy rate. Surprise, surprise. So for men, it's about 60 or 70. 70% of the population, the male population, are literate. Now, I will say, the test of literacy is being able to write your own name. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It might go no further than that. Yeah, exactly. You might not be sat down reading like the full works of Shakespeare. You might be, and good for you. For women, it was about 50 or 60%, which is still like relatively, when you think about the 18th century, just a few decades earlier, like, this is an increase. We've moved on, yeah. We've moved on.

But within the kind of nuance of that, maybe not. everybody is sitting down as we would maybe do now to personally read a book quietly in our heads. Most people are reading out loud to family members, to people in the pub, to friends at work, that kind of thing. So the kind of texts that are making their way into the hands of the working and the middling classes are things that are quick and easy to read that are gripping, that can be read aloud and will be exciting and can almost act it out, which I think is fascinating. Also, cheap print media in this time as well, it is not only spreading stories, but it is also spreading political ideas amongst the working classes. They're getting ideas above their station. The Chartist movement, which we've covered before when we spoke about machine breaking in the industrial north, is a kind of mass working class campaign across Britain to demand political reform and in particular votes for men and workers' rights and that kind of thing. And all of this is sort of the world is changing. People are and more stories. They're telling stories about their aspirations, where they want to be, their anxieties. Everything in this new Victorian era, and we are very new into the Victorian era, only a few years in, is being worked out in print. And you can see that happening in real

time. So you talked about this kind of sharing orally written word stories in taverns or at home around the fires. We don't do that enough. Not you and I. We spent a lot of time talking If anything, yeah, we're keeping it going. But I wish more people would do that. Like, do you ever read out loud to anyone? Christ, no. Well, maybe my nephews when there were babies. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I'm going to have to do a lot of baby reading out loud. But I do insist on reading out loud ghost stories at Christmas to my family. I do do that. And everyone's like, I know Maddie's dad, yeah, I know Maddie's dad listens to this. And I can tell you now I'm speaking for him when he's like, this woman will not stop reading ghost stories. It's my sister who really. really hates it. She's like, no, no, thank you. It's not for me. I love that. I love from people

are not by, sit down by the fire. But I equally love that you force it. I force it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm here for the old. And the eldest sibling. Yeah, you can do it. But one of the things that does help facilitate this kind of group, imagination, sharing of literature is the Penny Dreadful. Yes. Also sometimes called the Penny Horrible, the Penny Awful or the Penny Blood. I like all of those names. Adore. But tell us what that is. That is the baby name of choice. What, penny blood? Can you imagine? Penny awful.

Penny blood's better. But we're not calling it that. Maddie, come on. We've loads to do. What is a penny dreadful? If you're doing the drinking game of Anthony moving Maddie along while she chats, take a sip. Okay, so the penny dreadful slash horrible slash blood is a serial publication. It's published weekly.

It has anywhere between eight to 16 pages. Good maths. That's like a double volume, I guess, sometimes. This is well done me. It costs about a penny. So it's very affordable for the lower-clothes in the title. Yeah, clue is in the title. Yeah, my gosh.

You could buy it from street sellers, bookshops, markets, and train stations, importantly. Maybe not to begin with in the 1840s, but certainly as we go through the Victorian era. And it says so much about the sort of the cheap disposability of this, I suppose. This is like rapid. Like, I need some entertainment. Like now you'd just put in a podcast of choice into your ears on the tube. But you'd be reading the paydryffle if this was the Victorian era. they are really kind of pulpy, a bit trashy.

They're leaning into this interest in crime in particular and mystery and murder that happens. So we've spoken so much in this podcast before about things like the Police Illustrated News in this period, which was kind of a more serious publication compared to the penny dreadful but would have the illustrations on the front of real crime scenes and sort of things that had happened around the city.

And so this genre is leaning into that. It's fictionalising things. It is borrowing heavily from stuff that's really happening, right? This is very much like, ooh, someone got horribly brutally brutally murdered over there. Did they write? It's just put some characters in around this, you know. And it's beloved of people across the classes across Britain. I would have been reading this.

Without a shadow of a doubt, I would have been grabbing Penny Redfalls as it's going on trains and all kinds of. Oh, I think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think they would have been my... I'm always really interested as well in this moment of, you know, we think of some of the biggest writers of the time in the 19th century. I'm thinking in particular of Charles Dickens. Other female writers are available.

But I'm thinking in terms of like that serialization and the sort of rapidity with which things are churned out and produced of varying quality. I'm not necessarily comparing Charles Dickens' work to the writer of Penny Dreadful. But there's so much kind of fizzing creativity in this moment of like, quick, let's get these stories out here. We have to get people engaged and excited. And that is what you see happening here. It also, I will say, the penny dreadful in particular,

leans into fears around in London specifically, and I suppose other industrial towns and cities as they get bigger in the north as well. This idea of urbanisation, bringing with it strangeness, that you are a stranger to the person you pass in the street, that no longer are you part of a community or a parish, you don't necessarily know your neighbours. If you're in the lower classes living in London,

you don't necessarily know the person you're renting rooms off. You don't even know the person who's sleeping in the same room as you. Essentially room bed even, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so there's this kind of fear of like strangers, foreigners within that, of course, playing into that as well. But just this idea of not knowing who it is that you are dealing with on a day-to-day basis and the danger of that.

One of the things that I'm intrigued about in this particular episode is we are bearing in mind that this is a moment in time, which you've set up really clearly. But then we introduce this fictional element, which sometimes we struggle with on After Dark Ride, because we're just like, well, why are we bringing in something that didn't really happen? Yeah, I will say, when the producers came to us and said, do you want to do an episode on Sweet Todd, after several rounds of singing, it's like, is there a history, though? Yeah, I remember you asking. Yeah. So before we get into a bit more of the history, tell me what The original story was.

Yeah, so the original story was published in a penny dreadful, and it's called The String of Pearls. Oh, God, I didn't expect you to say, the String of Pearl. What's that got to do with anything? Well, wait and see. There are some characters in here that you will recognize if you have seen the musical, or you've seen the Tim Burton, what, 2007 adaptation of the musical, a joint-up. Yeah, yeah, somewhere around then. Well done.

Yeah. Is that in your notes? I think it probably is. It's not the ones that I'm looking up. I feel like it's lodged there some way. Okay, so the String of Pearls was serialized, and it's not. It came out in these episodes from November 1846 through to March 1847. Perfect spooky season publication timeline there.

Well done. It was eventually all put together and published as a book in 1850 because it was so popular. Okay. It's set in 1785, which I think is really interesting because obviously we think of Sweetie Todd as this high Victorian Gothic, quite camp, gory story. And actually, we have an 18th century setting. It's set in the foggy, grim and damp Fleet Street in London. Okay, so that's the same?

It's the same, yeah, the Demon Barber, Fleet Street. So check. However, enter a character that we don't necessarily, I don't think we meet him in the musical, I don't think he's in here, Lieutenant Thornhill. No idea. So he is an army lieutenant.

He is wandering around London, and he decides he needs a shave. Okay. So he goes into the barbershop of one, Mr. Sweetie Todd. a character we recognise. Now, Thornhill, through a series of events, is carrying with him a string of pearls on behalf of someone else he has served with

called Colonel Geoffrey. Now, Colonel Geoffrey presumably has died or has asked Thornhill to bring the pearls. And the pearls are meant for the Colonel's lover, who is a character called Joanna Oakley. Joanna. Yeah, I hate that song. Worst song in the entire musical.

Yep, let's accept that and move on. And also, right, Joanna in the musical does nothing. There's all the metaphors of her being a little trapped bird in a cage, passive, passive, passive, passive. I'm just cute and beautiful, and a little squee voice waiting to be rescued. Not Joanna in this story. Oh, okay, go on. So Thornhill goes in, has his shave. Oh, he gets killed in that way.

He gets killed. And Sweeney Tard puts him through the secret trap door down to Mrs. Lovett's pie shop. Oh, so that's even there. Okay. We do have this. and the way that it's set up in the serialized story is Todd's secret that he has the trapdoor going into the pie shop is set up really early on

it's really obvious to the reader but not to the characters so you can imagine people reading the story out loud and you're shouting no don't sit in the chair, don't do it but so Thornhill disappears the lieutenant with the string of pearls Joanna takes it upon herself to investigate she dresses up as a boy

Good girl Joanna I know like this is the Joanna we needed in the musical and she goes to investigate Now, Joanna and Colonel Jeffrey, who sort of comes back into the story somehow. And they're lovers, right? They're lovers. They make the connection with Mrs. Lovett in the pie shop below because they hear rumors that she never gets a single meat delivery. Okay. That's the best song, the one about putting pussycats in pies.

The Mrs. Lovetong. Yeah, so good. They investigate the premises of the pie shop and they find, lo and behold, human remains. Sweethod tries to flee Mrs Lovett dies In some versions she's poisoned She poisons herself In other versions it's a suicide

Sweetod though is captured And he confesses and he is executed And in true Penny dreadful style You have to have a little bit of a happy ending So Joanna and Geoffrey The Colonel are reunited So So jeffrey's kind of ante me

To put the pearls on I was because they were the hell of the pearls Yeah exactly I presumed the pearls were going to be like And they found the pearls In a pie or something Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have an image, which was the original page one from the 1850 book version of this story.

and I would like you to describe it because I think it's a recognisable scene of the Sweeney Todd that we know and love. It's interesting actually. So there is a man, well, first of all, it's called The Barber's Lesson to His Apprentice and there is a man at the centre of the image in an actually very gothic-yed-looking chair

and he's dressed out of all the time periods that we have discussed. We've said 1785, we've said 1850. He looks like he's from the 1820s or something. But anyway, look, that's neither here nor there. This artist is making it up as they go along. But he's sitting down. He's splayed in his seat.

He's got like a claw-like hand holding onto one of the arms of the chair. But he is also looking at a young boy on the right-hand side. Well, is it Joanna? Initially, I thought it was Joanna. I did think that. But anyway, it's an apprentice is supposed to be. And he's essentially saying, shut your mouth there now you. Don't be saying anything about me killing people.

And then in the background, there's kind of all the barbary stuff laid out on a little, what's that called? Like a little dresser. Dresser, there you go. Well, we'll talk a little bit as well about the barber shop in this moment. The barber surgeon of centuries past, you know, you think of the red and white, swirly baton outside the shop that people still have. And that's been to represent bandages and blood and that the barber was someone who would do things like teeth removal, maybe cut a limb or two off for you if necessary, might have served in the military. But by this period, and we can see this in the image, you know, it's very much like you're shaving, you're cutting people's hair, you're making wigs as well, interesting. Yes, I'm always very fascinated about wigs and wig making in, well, in the 18th century more so.

By the way, that's Tobias. You know that little boy? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's sweet in the musical, I like him. Anyway, sorry. He's better than who's the kid in Les Mies. He's so annoying. And when he dies, it's like, thank God.

Gavroche or whatever. Oh, that's always the best bit in the musical when he's shot. Bye, Gavroche. Bye. Wow. Okay, but you're talking about this barbershop and you're talking about the function it has within the society within this world. But all of these places, I'm always fascinated by this actually. I was in this kind of 19th century reproduction bar yesterday, which was called Mr. Foggs.

It's near St. Martin's Lane. It's very Instagram friendly. I was not there for those reasons. But it's actually very immersive. It's actually, it's interesting. But what it did make me think was functionality of these places as opposed to just I'm going there for my Sunday lunch, which I did. There were more reasons to go to these places. in the late 18th, early 19th century.

They were really more hubby than we understand them to be now. Yeah, people's consumption of food and drink and services like the barbershop were completely different as they were now. So, for example, I don't know, did you wake up and have a shave this morning until you were pretty fresh face.

So you wouldn't have done that in the 19th century. You would have got this morning and gone to a barbershop before coming to work. That would be a normal thing. And you might have your shoes shined on the way as well, although you do have trainers on. They don't currently require shining. But, you know, there are the sort of services like that that were very much kind of, you know, lining the streets and the thoroughfares that people were traversing every day and that you would just pop into them as on when you needed them.

It's not so much, you know, if you want to go to the hairdress now and you make an appointment way in advance, you could probably just walk in and do that. There's a lot of spaces, though, that come up in this story that I just think is so interesting because it says so much about, I suppose, lower and middling experiences in the same. society. And these are all spaces in this story that everyone reading these stories aloud, hearing them read aloud, would recognize. So yes, we have the barbershop, which was a predominantly male-dominated space, by the way. Women didn't necessarily go to hairdressers in the same way they might cut their hair at home, especially in the lower classes. As we said, it would do things like shaving, hair-cutting, tooth extraction, just went in to get a quick shave and now you've got no teeth, things like hair, oil, perfumes, wax, that kind of thing. So you could kind of come up

being pretty preened and judged. The pie shop as well, thinking about Mrs. Lovett's pie shop. So these were everywhere. These are like your pretz or your costas basically. Although not to say that they are serving human flesh. No, no, no. Allegedly. Legitly.

Not even allegedly. So, okay, that's interesting that they are that on the go in grabbing this thing. Yes, very much so. These could either be a fixed location, like an actual shop that you walk into, but they could also be street traders that have little, you know, they're just pushing along a wheelbarrow full of pies, they've cooked at home or something like that, you get night stalls as well. So you get a pie in London pretty much at any time of night or day. And these were meals for people who back in their own lodgings did not have room to cook, did not have opportunity. You know, maybe I'm thinking if you're a single man and you're not going home to a family scenario, you're going home to a lodging house and your bed and board doesn't include a dinner. an evening meal or something like that. In 1851, there were between 5 and 700 pie shops that were fixed locations and 1,000 street traders. So they really are everywhere. What could you get inside them? Here you ask. Well, what could you get inside them, Maddie? A variety of

meats. Variety. Mutton, beef sounds vaguely acceptable. Rabbit, not so keen. Eel. Now, now we know Anthony's eaten eel before on our live show. Would you repeat that experience? especially not with pastry. That's not the one. The texture of that with pastry, no, thank you. Charles Dickens, talking of, joked about pies containing mystery meats. So often it wouldn't really be identifiable what you're eating. Yeah, and obviously, like, think about just like the hygiene levels.

And, you know, if you're getting one off a street trader, when was this pie cooked? When did the animal that's inside this die? Is it one animal or is there several animals? What's going on? There's no regulation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know it doesn't bear thinking about, does it? I mean, haven't we had something recently ourselves where something was horse meat? Like a few years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so this now, this is a really important thing that was kind of legislated against in the 19th century because this really was an issue, right, that you would get these meats where you couldn't identify them. And people would often purposefully alter the food. So there were lots of alteration scandals. So in the 1850s, people were putting alum in flour and also, They were using unknown meats and things.

Also, putting narcotics in beer. Oh, is it? There wasn't enough going on there already. Exactly. Like, give the people of London a chance. I don't like this. That's all a bit messy for you. Yeah, it's not great.

There was a book, even published in the 1820s called The Mysteries of Adulteration. So, like, this was a really big thing. And by 1860, there was an adulteration of food and drink act that made it illegal to knowingly alter foods, so to augment them with, like, things or to add in extra stuff. But 1860 is quite late. So for, you know, the first few decades of the Victorian era, and certainly of the 19th century, people are just eating whatever is put in front of them. If you're in North America and you listen to this, isn't your beef being injected and isn't your, all that kind of stuff. I was doing a recipe the other day and it was an American recipe for some chicken.

And it said to dry your chicken beforehand. I was like, why is it wet? Why is it wet? I don't understand. What the hell is a wet chicken? Right in and tell me why your chicken is so. Now, one thing I want to know amidst all this discussion of wet chickens is often these people, you know, we've talked about Dracula in terms of our literature thing. And there's a real person behind it, even if it's, again, Victorian, but they're looking to another time or another place or another country, whatever. That has inspired this figure. Is there, is there a Sweeney Todd? There are several potential Sweeney Todd's from different periods in history. Okay. So I'm going to give you a few of them. of the sort of main contenders, let's say, is actually not from London at all, but from

gay Paris in the 14th century. So probably not quite so gay in the 14th century, probably more grimy and death. Now, he was supposedly lived on the Rue de Mamaset, excellent pronunciation. Mamocet. Yeah, no, I'm just saying I'm weird. I don't know why this street is called this, but it is still a small street near to Notre Dame. So it still exists. There's no real proof that he ever existed. For God's sake. I hate shit like that. Yeah, I know. It's so frustrating. But I will say, from the 17th century onwards, we do see him appearing in different French Chronicles.

He's a barber who is connected to a pastry shop. Ah, sure, look. Yeah. And the idea is that he lures the customers in. He shaves them, cuts their throats, drops them down a trap door. So we do have that. And that he is then making the pies with the meat, which apparently the Parisians, they can't get enough fit, not realizing what it is. I think it's fantastic.

Well, that's definitely the origins of this story, even if it's itself. only a story. It's the origins, I would say, well, maybe it's an example of a trope. Sure. That continues throughout history. Even if it's not the origins. There are other versions. Go on.

So in Britain, in England, we do have two different versions. There's a late 17th century broadside ballad called the Bloody Barber of Bishopgate, which got a lovely all the alliteration of the 17th century. And he is meant to be, you know, this is kind of circulated in cheap print again for of popular consumption. And this is a song about someone who lures the customers, cuts the throats, hides the bodies, and they are discovered by accident. There's no claim in that one of him making them into pies. However, in the 19th century, so closer to, the early 19th century this is, but we are getting closer to the actual Sweeney Todd era. There was a pie man of St. Giles,

and there were bones found in the cellar of this pie maker's shop. And the rumors at the time were that some of the bones were human. And this became. became kind of slang, and if you had a St. Giles' pie, it basically meant a pie with anything in it. You didn't know what it was. So it was kind of, it was like short-hand for like, this food's a bit dodge, basically. There are other examples from across Europe, get ready for some German pronunciation. So there's a German story called Dimension Fressenbucker. You're welcome. I can't tell you one way or the other. How good or bad that is. I'm guessing bad. I've known. And this is an 18th and 19th century folk tale about a baker who

during wartime shortages uses dead soldiers to put in his pies, which, you know, we're thinking that sounds far-fetched, but you've got to think about the battlefield at Waterloo. Waterloo. How does that feed into this? Somebody eating people. No, but the bodies were kind of cannibalized in other ways. They weren't consumed, as far as we know, by human beings, but their teeth were taken to make false teeth.

They were, I think, weren't they kind of? boiled down to make agricultural manure and things like that, a lot of the bodies. Because if you look at the battlefield now, there's hardly any archaeological record of the actual bodies of that battle on that field because so many of them were taken away and used in certain ways. So, you know, that was a thing. One more is the Barbieri, a sassiny. Apologies to my Italian cousins out there who I know one of them actually have Italian cousins. Yeah, I know one of them does listen to this and he's probably, he'll be gesticulating an Italian to me right now. This was a murderous barber in 16th and 17th century, Venice or Bologna,

depending on the story that's being told. And again, he slits throats. He robs the customers. He kills foreigners when they come in for a shave in some versions of a trapdoor where he gets rid of them. There's no pie shop though in this one. So look, there are a lot of different versions. And I think it speaks to the anxiety of going to a barber shop. And don't forget in some of these earlier periods. This is a barber who might, you know, age you in the cutting off of a limb as well as tooth extraction, et cetera, et cetera. This is more of a surgeon. So it's someone who's doing bloody and gory things to people alongside having a shave. And also, just think about being shaved, even in the Victorian era, with a cutthroat razor. The clue is in the name. Have you ever done

that? Do you have a cutthroat razor? Oh, God, no, I don't. Jesus. I couldn't trust myself with that. No. Matt's got one at home. He has like a whole shaving, like, ritual he likes to do. He's bougie. I have a razor and I shave. Yeah. That's about it. And it's, but it is a real, it is blades. I feel sorry for you having to shave like every day or most of them.

We don't. We don't have periods. It's fine. Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah. Don't think about it too much. Yeah.

Yeah. But kind of a pain in the ass. Sure. I mean, again, periods. Like, whatever. We got off. Yeah. That's fine.

That's fair. Because those two things are comparable. No, I'm just saying if you have to put up with one thing, I'll do that. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. You know. Now, we always talk about this, how these stories and these tropes

feed into and appear at times of specific fears or conceptions of infiltration or unsteadiness or tumult or tension. Is there something specific about the time in which our Sweeney Todd in the 19th century appears that gives birth to this type of fear? I think so. I think it's, you know, what we were saying at the beginning of this episode

about feelings of the dangers brought by urbanisation, this idea that anyone was a stranger, you couldn't necessarily trust anyone, you didn't know what they were up to in the city, and that the city itself becomes this kind of dark, dangerous, labyrinthine mess of betrayal and crime and murder and that there are things going on behind every closed door that you are not party to. And the whole time the Penny Dreadful and other publications like it are capitalizing on that fear and fueling it, right?

They're constantly churning out. You know, these publishing houses are known as fiction factories. They are just churning out these stories of, you know, all these horrible things happening to people. I think also there's a kind of not so much class tensions because everyone in this being Todd's story, well, maybe not everyone, but there's a sense that it's set within the middling and lower working, the working classes, right? Like there's no one kind of aristocratic. I suppose in the original you do have the lieutenant and the colonel who would be perceived in that era to be more respectable, affluent people. but there's a sense of like, if you are living in the lower strata's of society, you are on your own. The mercy of anything, basically. You have to just take care of yourself.

Nobody's going to help you. Nobody's going to come and save you. So I think, you know, there's this kind of fear there and a kind of resentment there that people are buying into in terms of the penny dreffle and reading that. And, you know, it's probably quite accurate, in fact. So there's all of that. And just thinking about the setting, you know, thinking about all these spaces that were. ubiquitous to people like the pie shop, like the barber shop, but also there's a sort of gothic overtone to everything. London in this moment is becoming increasingly industrialised.

It's foggy, it's dark, it's grimy. I always think, you know, when you go to certain parts of London today where you have like full streets of Victorian buildings and they've all, you know, they're now worth like millions of pounds or whatever and all the bricks have been like beautifully pressure washed and everything's been restored. And it's hard to get an impression of the grime, the dirt from the horses and carriages, the gas lamps eventually and the kind of grimyness that, you know, the marks that that would leave and stuff. That these stories are set within that greasy, dirty world of 19th century London. And adjacent to that is then this idea of escape and what Londoners are doing to entertain themselves

that this feeds into two, so you have, you know, the freak shows, you have Madame Tussaud, we have... And it's all incredibly dark, though. This is escape through, it's like, let's, and I always say this is about sort of true crime today, especially the sort of female interest in true crime. It's like, let's go and look at the worst thing that can happen to make us feel better. Yeah, it's the thing, well, if we do that, then we're not looking at ourselves. Yeah. And it's, it's, you know, it's public executions are still happening.

And it just feeds, this type of story feeds into that genre of entertainment as well as it reflecting the history. But in terms of that entertainment then, is there an evolution that comes from the 1840s specifically? We've talked about the 14th century, for God's sake. We know there's an evolution, but in terms of the English-speaking... Yeah, the Sweeney-Tod's story, I mean, I think you can definitely, you know, legitimately argue that it goes all the way back to the 14th century, and it has this kind of through line and it, you know, is this malleable story that adapts all the time. In terms of the 19th century, yes. So we have the early 1840s, Penny Dreadful version, the string of pearls.

Then next, in 1847, we have... a stage play by George Dibden Pitt. Then we have, you know, other kind of theatrical versions. There's a later 19th century version that has like fake blood pouring on the stage. There's trap doors. Like it's very much, it's an adaptation of the Stringer Pearl story in particular, but it's very much like meant to kind of shock the audience. You want lots like gasps and ladies fainting and people walking out and that kind of thing. It was meant to be really horrible. And then you start to get stage versions that add in humour, which is a little bit of what we see with the musical that we have inherited now, where Mrs. Lovett becomes a more central

character, and Sweeney Todd kind of becomes more nuanced and complicated, doesn't he? So you get different versions where he is wronged. So in 1973, jumping to the 20th century, there's a Christopher Bond play that adds the backstory to Sweeney Todd where he's been wronged and he's seeking revenge for his dead family, which of course we have in the musical now. 1979, we have the Sondheim and Wheeler musical version. That is from 1979. Yeah. So the 70s, we have the play and the musical. There's a big moment for Sweeney Todd. And, you know, that very much kind of adds this comic focus again.

Obviously, there's now music added in as well. And then in 2007, I was right, we have the Tim Burton musical. The thoughts on the Tim Burton musical? I enjoyed it. I went to see it. I love Helena Bonham Carter. I love Tim Burton. I was very much in a Sweenie Todd type place in terms of musical because I trained in

musical theatre. It wasn't just acting. It was musical theatre. And so I was consuming an awful lot of musical theatre at that time. What is your ideal musical role to play? Oh, God, role. None now. I don't hold any dreams of musical theatre now.

But at the time... If you could just step into one now. Okay. It was parade by Jason Robert Brown. Oh, okay. It's a grim story. I don't know it that well. Yeah, it was on at the Dunmire around.

That kind of time, actually, 2007, 2008, 2009, maybe. And it's about a man who's accused of murdering a young girl. Oh, dearie. in 19th century America and it's about how we never find out whether he does it or not but it's the whole thing

and it's just sublime it's so good yeah but like it's not a rollicking good time as you might imagine but Sweeney Todd was up there one of the first musicals I did after drama school

was a Sondime we did Assassins that was my first job I think and so yeah I was very aware of it in 2007 it was very there and so I really was it was part of your personality

yeah and but then you know when you're when you're a musical theatre person, you're just like, oh, well, I didn't do this. And I'd like, I don't give a shit. But at the time. If I could sing. Yeah. Phantom the Opera.

Christine, not the Phantom. I mean, I play the Phantom. I actually want to see you do the Phantom. I don't want to see you do Christine. I mean, what's he called? He did it in the film adaptation. He couldn't sing either, and he did a great job. Oh, I haven't actually seen that one.

But again, there was a lot of movie musicals around that time. Because it was around then as well, is a big influx. Yeah, what else was there at the time? It was hairspray. There was, this is all, you know, give me a fine. of your period here, because there's not all saying here, but... Les Més. Yeah, yes.

Maybe to the was the end of that period. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was there. There was lots, yeah. When was Chicago, probably a bit before that, right? Did Chicago start all of that? I would be anyone in Chicago, just anything. Yeah. Delicious.

I did Chicago for my showcase. All of these musical theatre. Wow. God, I can't even begin to... And now, if you want to listen to some bonus material, Anthony will now be singing the entirety of Chicago. Yeah, I won't. No, I really won't.

But, yeah, no, that was a different time. Yeah. Nice. Anyway, there you go. Thank you for bringing me back to my musical theatre background there, Maddie Pelling. That is the history of Sweeney Todge, which even we weren't convinced that there was much of a history. But actually, when you look into what's going on on the street level, in terms of how entertainment is being consumed, what's influencing that entertainment output, then it's a really interesting way to consume that history and bring a bit of history to that folk tale, that horror tale. So thank you for doing that.

I've enjoyed today's episode. If you have chat away in the comments, wherever you listen to your podcast or if you're watching on YouTube, let us know your thoughts on Sweeney Dodd, on the movie adaptations. If you've seen it on stage, who's your favourite Sweeney Todd if you are a musical theatre kid? I know. But until next time,

when we have another gory, dark or disturbing history for you, sleep tight.