SWEENEY TODD AND MY TEACHER

OK, here is in my opinion, one of the best old stories from the UK. As a child, I had a wonderful teacher, he was my hero. Sadly now not with us, but as children, he would read to us once a week. This was one of the stories he would read and I shall write about more in the coming weeks.

I was nine and sat in fear though complete anticipation as the words fell from the pages of this fantastic novel. I am sure it is a true story. Here goes.

Sweeney Todd is a fictional character who first appeared as the murderer of the Victorian penny dreadful the string of pearls 1846/47 in 1979, he was introduced as an antihero in the musical Sweeney Todd the demon barber of Fleet street and it’s 2007 film adaptation of the same name.

Claims that Sweeney Todd was a historical person

    

In the original version of the tale, Todd is a barber who dispatches his victims by pulling a lever as they sit in his barber chair. His victims fall backward down a revolving trapdoor into the basement of his shop, generally causing them to break their necks or skulls. In case they are alive, Todd goes to the basement and "polishes them off" (slitting their throats with his straight razor

In some adaptations, the murdering process is reversed, with Todd slitting his customers' throats before dispatching them into the basement via the revolving trapdoor. After Todd has robbed his dead victims of their goods, Mrs Lovett

his partner in crime (in some later versions, his friend and/or lover), assists him in disposing of the bodies by baking their flesh into meet pies

and selling them to the unsuspecting customers of her pie shop. Todd's barber shop is situated at 186 Fleet street London next to St Dunstan’s church.

And is connected to Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop on Bell Yard, by means of an underground passage. In most versions of the story, he and Mrs. Lovett hire an unwitting orphan boy, Tobias Ragg to serve the pies to customers.

 The tale became a staple of Victorian melodrama Later it was the subject of a 1959 ballet by English composer Sir Malcolm Arnold  and in 1979 a Tony award winning Broadway musical The last-mentioned, by far the best-known 20th Century version of the tale, was adapted for the screen in 2007, but in my opinion, you can’t beat the book.

In rhyming slang, Sweeney Todd is the flying squad, a branch of

The UK's Metropolitan Police), which inspired the television series.

The Sweeney.