The String of Pearls

What It's About

Serialized in 1846–47, this penny dreadful follows Sweeney Todd, a barber on Fleet Street whose customers have an unfortunate habit of disappearing. His chair is rigged to drop victims into the cellar below, and their remains find their way, by a grim arrangement, into the meat pies sold next door by Mrs Lovett. Threaded through the horror is a more conventional domestic plot: Johanna Oakley searches for her missing sweetheart, the sailor Mark Ingestrie, last known to be carrying a valuable string of pearls meant for her.

Key Concepts

This is the story that gave the world Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovett — characters who went on to become a full-blown Victorian stage legend and, eventually, Sondheim's musical. As a penny dreadful, it was written cheaply and quickly for a mass working-class readership, favouring cliffhangers and lurid incident over polish, and it reflects the era's appetite for sensational crime narratives set against the anxieties of a rapidly growing, anonymous city.

About the Author

Authorship of The String of Pearls has long been disputed between Thomas Peckett Prest and James Malcolm Rymer, two of the most prolific hack writers churning out cheap serial fiction for publisher Edward Lloyd in 1840s London. Prest (c.1810–1859) trained as a printer before turning to songwriting and then serial fiction, becoming known for Dickens parodies and gothic melodrama. Rymer (1814–1884), of Scottish descent but London-born, worked as a civil engineer before becoming a prolific, notoriously secretive writer of penny dreadfuls under a string of pseudonyms. For decades Prest was credited as sole author, but more recent scholarship favours Rymer, or a collaboration between the two — the truth is likely to remain unresolved given how little Lloyd's publishing house recorded about who wrote what.