Sweeney Todd is one of the most famous people in the world, his legendary status is up there with Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper and George W. Bush. This demonic, insane barber of Victorian-era London who loved slitting the throats of his victims with a straight-razor and sending them sliding down through a trapdoor into the basement of the pie-shop below, run by his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, has been famous for over a hundred years as one of the most bloodthirsty serial-killers in the world.

But did he ever exist?

The recent Johnny Depp film of a couple of years back, entitled “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” was an amazing success, but was any of the story ever based on fact? Or is it just the concoction of a lively and grusome imagination? This article will explore the world of Todd, the truths, the facts, the falsehoods and lies.

Sweeney Todd: The Man

Sweeney Todd, the insane barber. A real person or a figment of imagination?

Sorry to disappoint the more bloodthirsty readers out there, but Sweeney Todd was not a real person. As far as reliable historical records and research have uncovered, a man named Sweeney Todd never existed. Possibilities that Todd was in fact based on a real serial-killer by a different name are equally unlikely. Examinations of legal records from courthouses such as the Old Bailey in London have concluded that Todd was little more than a Victorian-era urban legend. If Todd was, or was based on a real person, pieces of evidence to support this are either few and far between and of questionable repute, or never existed at all.

Sweeney Todd: The Myth

If Sweeney Todd never existed, either as a person himself, or as an alias for another person, then how did he come about?

Sweeney Todd was ‘born’ in 1846. He was the subject of a short story called “The String of Pearls”, which was published as a ‘penny dreadful’ during the early Victorian-era. Penny dreadfuls were exactly what they sounded like – cheap, short stories or novels which were just…dreadful…to read. These short stories were printed on news-rag and their plots were usually dark, lurid, erotic and morbid…all the things that respectable publishing-houses of the time refused to run through their printing-presses.

Sweeney Todd’s method of killing was to slit his victims in a specially-constructed barber’s chair. By pulling a lever or pressing a foot-pedal with his shoe, Todd could make the chair tilt over, tipping his victims down a trapdoor into a basement below. The drop would make the victims break their necks. After they were dead, the bodies were then processed into meat pies, to be sold by Todd’s partner-in-crime, Mrs. Lovett, in her pie-shop, in the most hardcore example of food-adulteration in the world.

Over the next century and a half, the public lapped up Sweeney Todd. There plays made about him, books written about him and at least two films with him as the main character. Although Todd himself never existed, I think one reason why the story lasted so long and was so popular among the Victorians was because it concentrated on elements of daily life that would have been very familiar to men reading the ‘Todd’ stories back in the 1840s and 50s.

Elements of Sweeney’s Legend

Although Sweeney Todd wasn’t real, even though he was only a murderer on ink and paper, the fear and horror he generated and continues to generate to this day, is due mostly to mankind’s combined fears of two things, which Todd did much to excacerbate: The straight-razor and food-adulteration. Almost singlehandedly, Todd turned what was once a finely-crafted blade into a cold, hard killing-utensil, and made all our fears of “mystery meat” a reality, so to speak. But what was the reality of these things back in Victorian times? Did people really turn people into pies and serve them for lunch?

Shaving with a Straight Razor

If Sweeney Todd did one thing at all, he made the straight-razor the fearsome, lethal, morbid and terrifying throat-slitting, blood-gushing murder-utensil that we know it for today, capable of ending life in a second with nothing more than a quick draw across the flesh. Now people are just terrified of these things, aren’t they? Show someone a gun and they start looking all over it, touching it, staring at it, examining it minutely. Show someone a straight-razor and they’ll hand over their wallets so fast they’d get leather-burn on their fingers. Popular culture and Sweeney Todd has ingrained in mankind that straight-razors are horrific, dangerous knives which only highly skilled professionals or insane barbers would ever dare apply to their faces. But how much of all this whazzoolally is actually fact?

Straight-razors are extremely sharp, there’s no doubt about that. They would be useless for their intended purpose (uh…shaving, folks. Don’t forget, they are razors!) if they were not, but the chances of actually cutting yourself with a straight-razor, or having someone else cut you with a straight-razor, if it was used as a razor, are actually rather minimal, provided of course that the razor is ready for shaving. The reason for this is because the angle of the blade required to cut hair and the sheer lack of pressure applied to the blade-edge would make slitting your throat highly unlikely. Furthermore, the slick, lubricated surface of prepared, lathered skin means that the open blade slides across your skin’s lubricated surface, it doesn’t scrape across dry skin, cutting into it. Straight-razors are used in smooth, sweeping vertical strokes, edge-leading, spine-following, not in side-to-side slitting, slashing horizontal movements! With enough practice, a steady hand and a sufficiently honed and stropped blade, you can soon gain enough proficiency to shave to perfection with a straight-razor. It’s not that hard.

Today, few people shave with a straight-razor…which is a pity, because in today’s waste-conscious, green-worrying world, a straight-razor is the ultimate in long-lasting bathroom accessories. You sharpen it, strop it, shave with it and then just continue honing and stropping it and shaving with it throughout the rest of your life, never having to buy another razor ever again. Apart from looking amazingly cool, shaving with a straight-razor saves you a lot of money, believe me!

Sweeney Todd’s seven-piece straight-razor set from the movie “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”. While most straight-razors are sold on their own, if you can afford it, you could…and still can…buy a seven-piece razor-set, with a different blade for each day of the week

Of course, there were people back in the Victorian-era who couldn’t shave themselves, for various reasons. Maybe they didn’t own a razor, or they didn’t have the skills necessary to shave themselves. This was where the barber came in. The unshaven man would visit the barber, who was (and still is) the only professional man qualified to give anothe person a shave. Barbers used to be trained in the art of shaving and were expected to be able to give smooth, quick, bloodless shaves as part of their training. The barber would prepare the man’s face by softening it with hot water and a towel, brush on the lathered shaving-soap and then start the steady and methodic task of shaving. Lying back defenselessly in a barber’s chair while a man stood over you with nothing less than three-and-a-half inches of steely, ice-cold metallic death in his hands was probably enough to scare anyone, and it was this fear that Sweeney Todd preyed on, and to this day, many people are terrified to shave with straight-razors, even though they’re actually no more dangerous than a cartridge-razor.

Food Adulteration in Victorian England

The other big fear that Sweeney Todd generated was that of food adulteration. Food-adulteration is the process of making food out of unsuitable or substandard products. Although we like to think that food back in the old days was fresh-baked, fresh-picked, fresh-harvested and free from preservatives, pesticides and additives, colours and all that stuff…the truth was significantly more different.

Until the late 19th century, food-adulteration and contamination was rife in Victorian-era England. Almost anything was used to make anything else and anything else was advertised as anything the customer wished it to be. If the customer wanted to believe it was ice-cream…it was ice-cream…not paint, sugar, milk, cream and ice blended to look like ice-cream (which it could very well have been!).

One of the key elements of the Sweeney Todd legend is that his victims were processed and turned into meat pies. Although I’ve found no records or information that Victorians ever served up cannibalistic culinary creations such as this, what is known for sure and certain is that the Victorians were notorious for serving contaminated food. There were precious few health-laws in the 19th century, and there were even fewer laws governing food and drink. Because of this, unscrupulous vendors could sell absolutely horrific grub to the public with the public being none the wiser. It was estimated that in the mid-1800s, over half the food sold by food-hawkers in London was contaminated. How contaminated?

Toffee sold to children could contain lice, fleas, hair and sawdust.
Tea-leaves could be recycled, dried, redarkened with ink and resold as “fresh” tea.
Mustard could contain lead.
Chocolate could contain mercury.
Milk was watered down, and then rewhitened with chalk.
Cheese that was mouldy could be covered with paint to make it look fresh.
Butter, gin and bread all had varying amounts of copper added to it, to give it that fresh, yellow appearance.
Chalk was also added to bread to whiten it, due to the high price of flour.
Beer was watered-down with water or even vitriol! What is vitriol you ask? Consult your highschool science-teacher. ‘Vitriol’ (also called ‘Oil of Vitriol’) was a Victorian English term for the compound known today as…sulphuric acid! Eugh!

These, and hundreds of other atrocities far too numerous to mention here, were all commonplace in Victorian England and would have been horrors that Victorians who were familiar with the stories of Sweeney Todd, would become increasingly aware of as the years rolled by. The first act of British parliament to try and control food-adulteration came out in 1860. It wasn’t very strongly enforced though, and was largely ignored by those whose job it was to uphold the law. It wasn’t until 1875 and the passage of the ‘Sale of Food & Drugs’ act that proper laws regarding hygeine of food and drink were brought into permanent and practical effect.