Sweeney Todd - Alleged Historical Basis

Alleged Historical Basis

The original story of Sweeney Todd was quite possibly based on an older urban legend, originally based on dubious pie-fillings. In Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers (1836/7), the servant Sam Weller says that a pieman used cats "for beefsteak, veal and kidney, 'cording to the demand", and recommends that people should buy pies only "when you know the lady as made it, and is quite sure it ain't kitten." Dickens then developed this in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) published two years before the appearance of Sweeney Todd in The String of Pearls (1846-7), with a character called Tom Pinch, who is grateful that his own "evil genius did not lead him into the dens of any of those preparers of cannibalic pastry, who are represented in many country legends as doing a lively retail business in the metropolis".

A similar story, which first appeared in an 1824 publication called The Tell Tale, reported how a barber and wig-maker of the Rue de la Harpe in Paris cut his customers' throats, relieved them of their valuables and then had their bodies made into meat pies, utilising the services of a pastry cook, whose establishment was on the same street. This is supposedly based on an account by Joseph Fouché, the Parisian chief of police, but the supposed book by Fouché is impossible to trace. The earliest version of the story claims "This case was of so terrific a nature, it was made part of the sentence of the law, that besides the execution of the monsters upon the rack, the houses in which they perpetrated those infernal deeds, should be pulled down, and that the spot on which they stood should be marked out to posterity with horror and execration." About six years before this story appeared, two houses on the street had been torn down to allow access to the ruins of the Thermes de Cluny. It is suspected this may have fed or sparked the rumour.

Claims that Sweeney Todd was a real person were first made in the introduction to the 1850 (expanded) edition of The String of Pearls and have persisted to the present day. In two books, Peter Haining argued that Sweeney Todd was a historical figure who committed his crimes around 1800. Nevertheless, other researchers who have tried to verify his citations find nothing in these sources to back Haining's claims. A check of the website Old Bailey for "Associated Records 1674-1834" for an alleged trial in December 1801 and hanging of Sweeney Todd for January 1802 shows no reference; the only murder trial for this period is that of a Governor/Lt Col. Joseph Wall who was hanged 28 January 1802 for killing a Benjamin Armstrong on 10 July 1782 on the isle of Gorée, West Africa, and the discharge of a Humphrey White in January 1802.

A late (1890s) reference to the urban legend of the murdering barber can be found in the poem by the Australian bush poet Banjo Paterson—The Man from Ironbark.