Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street: The String of Pearls — The Complete Annotated Edition, Volume One

The complete, unabridged original that gave the world Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street — a two-volume annotated edition. This is Volume One.

A stranger walks into a small barber’s shop by St. Dunstan’s church. He is never seen to walk out. So begins the most notorious penny dreadful ever written, the sprawling Victorian romance that created Sweeney Todd, his murderous chair, his terrified apprentice Tobias, and the pie-maker Mrs. Lovett, whose celebrated pies hide a secret too horrible to name.

Everyone knows the Demon Barber from the stage and screen. Almost no one has read the original. At more than one hundred and seventy chapters, the full 1850 penny-part romance is a genuinely two-volume work, reprinted here whole and unabridged. Volume One carries Chapters 1 through 84, opening the tale on Fleet Street and following it to its darkest turn.

This Complete Annotated Edition adds an original introduction that untangles the tale’s history and its disputed authorship, the original 1850 Preface, and Notes on the Text explaining the Fleet Street geography and Victorian slang. Volume Two (Chapters 85 to 177) brings the story to its close.

Contains scenes of violence and menace consistent with the original text.