By James Carr
At first glance, Sweeney Todd and Jekyll and Hyde appear broadly similar. They’re both set in nineteenth-century London, they’re both centred around homicidal maniacs and their love interests, whilst being unreal and sensational. In Tim Burton’s musical version of Sweeney, the stark contrast between the twisted Mr Todd and his idealistic younger self Benjamin Barker clearly mirrors the polar opposites, good and evil, represented by Dr. Jekyll and his alter-ego Mr Hyde. You might wonder what a feature on two musicals is doing in the ‘Books’ section. Well, the origins of both tales lie within the vast realms of literature, albeit of very different kinds.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, written as a novella in 1886, was inspired by a disturbing dream suffered by the famed Scottish wordsmith Robert Louis Stevenson. The story is entirely told from the standpoint of Jekyll’s close friend John Utterson, with Jekyll’s dual identity only revealed through the reading of his will after all the events (and killings) have taken place. The story was lauded by late Victorian society as an enlightening moral tale, which served as a ‘guidebook’ to free oneself from the evil influences of the subconscious, and as a piercing condemnation of the hypocrisy demonstrated by those concealing their true inner lusts through the projection of outward respectability. That Stevenson was considered to be espousing a serious moral message is shown in that priests regularly referred to his work in their sermons.
In contrast, the tale of a homicidal barber emerged as a popular urban legend billed by Victorian melodramas as ‘based on fact’. Court records do indicate the existence of Sweeney Todd as a historical figure, executed in January 1802 for an unknown crime, but the later embellishments – a trap-door under the chair, the razor-slit throats of customers, and their incorporation into delicious meat pies – materialise during the 1830s, doubtless fuelled by tales of ‘cannibalistic pastry preparers’ in Paris and in the works of Charles Dickens. The actual stringing together of a story, under the name The String of Pearls (no pun intended), came in 1846 as an eighteen-part sensationalist cartoon strip in Edward Lloyd’s newspaper. The lurid serial was initially envisioned as a cheap thrill for adolescents, but was made into both melodrama and book within five years. Both tales continue to capture and hold the public imagination, portals into a very different and dangerous age, but their beginnings were, evidently, very different.