Sweeney Todd and his exploits first appeared as a serial published in the British magazine “The People’s Periodical and Family Library” over the course of a few months between 1846-1847. It’s impossible to say what inspired its authors, Thomas Peckett Prest and James Malcolm Ryner, but they were certainly not the first Englishmen to write about human flesh being cooked into meat pies and eaten by unsuspecting dupes.
A few years earlier, Charles Dickens, author of the touching morality tale “A Christmas Carol,” used this as a plot point in both “The Pickwick Papers” and “Martin Chuzzlewit.” As it turns out, Dickens wasn’t blazing a trail in this regard, either. He was beaten to the punch by The Bard himself, William Shakespeare, who worked the idea into his play “Titus Andronicus.”
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Were Dickens, Shakespeare, and anyone else who has tackled this or an adjacent subject working from real-life crimes? There have certainly been cases of cannibals over the centuries, and there has been at least one documented murderous barber.
