The String of Pearls
| Author | Unknown but probably James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest |
|---|---|
| Working title | The Barber of Fleet Street. A Domestic Romance |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Sweeney Todd |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Set in | London |
| Published | 1846-47 by Edward Lloyd 1850 as a book |
| Media type | Print (Penny dreadful) |
| Pages | 732 pp (Book) |
| OCLC | 830944639 |
| LC Class | PR5285.R99 |
| Text | at |
The String of Pearls: A Romance is the title of a fictional story first published as a penny dreadful serial from 1846–47. The main antagonist of the story is the infamous Sweeney Todd, "the Demon Barber of Fleet Street," who here makes his literary debut.
Todd is a barber who murders his customers and turns their remains into meat pies sold at the pie shop of Mrs. Lovett, his partner in crime. His barber shop is situated in Fleet Street, London, next to St. Dunstan's church, and is connected to Lovett's pie shop in nearby Bell Yard by means of an underground passage. Todd dispatches his victims by pulling a lever while they are in his barber chair, which makes them fall backward down a revolving trapdoor and generally causes them to break their necks or skulls on the cellar floor below. If the victims are still alive, he goes to the basement and "polishes them off" by slitting their throats with his straight razor.
The story is set in London in the year 1785. The plot concerns the strange disappearance of a sailor named Lieutenant Thornhill, last seen entering Sweeney Todd's establishment on Fleet Street. Thornhill was bearing a gift of a string of pearls to a girl named Johanna Oakley on behalf of her missing lover, Mark Ingestrie, who is presumed lost at sea. One of Thornhill's seafaring friends, Colonel Jeffrey, is alerted to the disappearance of Thornhill by his faithful dog, Hector, and investigates his whereabouts. He is joined by Johanna, who wants to know what happened to Mark.
Johanna's suspicions of Sweeney Todd's involvement lead her to the desperate and dangerous expedient of dressing up as a boy and entering Todd's employment after his last assistant, a young boy named Tobias Ragg, has been incarcerated in a madhouse for accusing Todd of being a murderer. Eventually, the full grisly horror of Todd's activities is uncovered when the dismembered remains of hundreds of his victims are discovered in the crypt underneath St. Dunstan's church. Meanwhile Mark, who has been imprisoned in the cellars beneath the pie shop and put to work as the cook, escapes via the lift used to bring the pies up from the cellar into the pie shop. Here he makes the following startling announcement to the customers of that establishment:
Mrs. Lovett is then poisoned by Sweeney Todd who is, himself, apprehended and hanged. Johanna marries Mark and lives happily ever after.
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