Was Sweeney Todd real? The truth about the barber of Fleet Street

Who invented Sweeney Todd?

Fleet Street was the street of ink. And in Salisbury Square, a small square just off it, was the business of Edward Lloyd, who specialised in penny serials: cheap, scary stories sold in instalments that readers followed week by week.

In November 1846, Lloyd began running a serial called The String of Pearls in one of his magazines, The People's Periodical and Family Library. It ran to eighteen weekly instalments, until March 1847. That's where Sweeney Todd makes his debut, a barber by trade with a shop on Fleet Street. His name is up over the shop in yellow letters that the text calls "extremely corpulent". In this story, even the lettering was overweight.

Who wrote it? Probably James Malcolm Rymer, a writer working for Lloyd. For years it was credited to others, Prest among them, and the question still isn't completely settled. In 1850 the whole story came out as a single volume, with a title page that leaves no doubt about where it came from: "Published by E. Lloyd, Salisbury Square, Fleet Street".

Why do people say Sweeney Todd was real?

That 1850 edition has a preface, and that's where the myth of a flesh-and-blood Todd begins. It speaks for the author, who answers readers asking whether Todd had ever existed: there certainly was such a man, he insists, and "the record of his crimes is still to be found in the chronicles of criminality of this country".

Then he adds two finishing touches. Todd's house, he explains, is gone, because a fire destroyed half a dozen buildings on that side of the street. But there's a secret passage linking the barber's cellar with St Dunstan's vaults. Although "no doubt, partially blocked up" when the church was rebuilt, he says, it "still remains".

Read that slowly, because the trick lies in what's missing. A record that's never cited. A house that's vanished. A tunnel nobody can show you. Not one victim's name, not one date, not one trial. It's "evidence" that, the way it's set out, nobody can check.

You have to admire the craft, mind you. St Dunstan's really was rebuilt: the present church dates from 1831. So the tunnel story had one foot in reality, which is exactly what a good lie needs.

Are there any records of a real Sweeney Todd?

A real Sweeney Todd is one of those myths London tells as if it were history. And the "evidence" has been kept up to date.

In 1924, the programme for a New York production claimed that the Newgate Calendar, the famous collection of condemned criminals' cases, recorded his hanging in January 1802, and even gave him a date of birth. In 1993 Peter Haining, a Fleet Street journalist, went further. He published Sweeney Todd: The Real Story of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, billed as the definitive biography after some twenty years of research. His Todd was born in Stepney in 1756, spent five years in prison for petty theft and came out bent on revenge.

The scholar Robert L. Mack, who has spent years on the history of the character, went through those sources. What he found were works of fiction that had never pretended to be anything else, and records of crimes and trials that simply don't exist. And one telling detail: Haining's summary was close to a word-for-word copy of the blurbs on those old theatre programmes.

So if someone tells you Todd "turns up in the archives", ask the questions the 1850 preface dodged. Which court? Which year? Which victims? Which document? If the answer is a burnt-down house and a blocked-up tunnel, or a book citing papers nobody can find, you'll know which recipe you're looking at.

Nobody has found the case. To be precise about it: the fact that it hasn't turned up doesn't prove beyond all doubt that London never had a murderous barber. But whoever first claimed there was a record gave no clue as to where to find it, and was writing for a business that made its money scaring readers by the instalment. With a hand like that, the burden of proof is theirs.

Where was Sweeney Todd's shop? What was real

In the novel, right next to St Dunstan's. Outside the novel, nowhere anyone has been able to document. But the church does have something the author didn't make up. Look at its front, in person or in a photo: above the clock, in their little pavilion, stand two giants with clubs who strike the bells. Those are real. And the novel uses them.

The String of Pearls opens with the barber's shop beside the church, back when George III was a young man, and with people watching the two figures strike the quarters. The text calls them "a great impediment to errand boys", and something for visitors from the countryside to gawp at. In another chapter Todd himself recommends them to a customer: they're "as large as life, and five times as natural", he says. A barber with a sense of humour. Not that it's terribly reassuring.

It was a well-chosen backdrop. The church of those days wasn't the one you see now. It jutted about nine metres further into the road, with shops leaning against its walls, each with its sign hanging out over the street. A barber's shop from a novel would have slipped in there without anyone noticing.

A century away from Fleet Street

The giants went up in 1671, five years after the Great Fire, and they were a hit. In the early eighteenth century a guide to London reported that on Sundays the giants drew a bigger audience than the preacher. A well-to-do little boy who was taken with them used to declare that one day those giants would be his. He kept his word. By 1830 he was the Marquess of Hertford, and with the old church about to make way for the new one, he bought them for his house in Regent's Park. Fleet Street didn't get its giants back until 1935, when Lord Rothermere returned them.

So the most genuine thing in the Sweeney Todd story also spent a century away from this street. The difference is that the giants came back.

Fact or legend.

• Fact: Sweeney Todd first appears in The String of Pearls, the serial that Edward Lloyd, a publisher based in Salisbury Square, began printing in November 1846.
• Fact: the preface to the 1850 edition claims that Todd existed, that his crimes are recorded in "the chronicles of criminality" and that the passage to St Dunstan's still remains. It gives no case, no date and no document.
• No evidence: that a real Todd ever existed. Nobody has found the case, and whoever claimed it never said where to look.
• Unsupported: the modern "biographies", such as the one from 1993. According to the scholar who checked them, their sources are fiction or records that don't exist.
• Probable, not certain: that the author was James Malcolm Rymer.
• Fact: the clock giants, put up in 1671, appear in the novel. They spent a century in Regent's Park and went back to the church in 1935.

Where to hear it

Podtour tells this story on the route "Fleet Street and the Temple: Printers, Lawyers and Sweeney Todd", outside St Dunstan-in-the-West. The stop "The barber who never existed" takes the 1850 preface apart, and the next one, "The real giants on the clock", is heard with the two giants in view. The route is part of the theme Legends and ghosts with a date.

If you're planning your trip, our London guide has the practical side covered.

Further reading

• [James Malcolm Rymer, attrib.], The String of Pearls, or, The Barber of Fleet Street: a Domestic Romance, E. Lloyd, London, 1850 (preface and chapter I). Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/stringofpearlsor00ryme
• Walter Thornbury, Old and New London, vol. 1, Cassell, Petter & Galpin, London, 1878 (chapter "Fleet Street: General Introduction"). British History Online: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol1/pp32-53
• Robert L. Mack, "Confronting the 'Real' Sweeney Todd: a Personal Journey of Discovery", Victorian Popular Fictions 4.2 (2022), pp. 136–145, DOI 10.46911/UKUD3206: https://victorianpopularfiction.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/009-Mack-VPFJ-4-2.pdf
• Ablett Architects, for the Guild Church Council of St Dunstan, "St Dunstan-in-the-West: The Giants Clock" (project PDF). https://www.ablettarchitects.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/St-Dunstan-in-the-West-The-Giants-Clock.pdf