The String of Pearls.

Down a shadowy stretch of Fleet Street stands a barber's shop where customers go in and are never quite seen to leave. The String of Pearls is the sensational serial that first told the tale of Sweeney Todd, and it planted one of the most durable horrors in popular culture.

What it's about

This is the founding text of the Sweeney Todd legend, a Victorian penny dreadful in which a murderous barber and his neighbour, the pie-maker Mrs Lovett, run a grisly enterprise in the heart of London. Around their crimes the story weaves mystery, disappearances and the slow gathering of suspicion, all delivered with the breathless melodrama that made the penny serials a mass sensation. The pearls of the title set the plot in motion, and part of the fun is watching the net draw tight without knowing quite how.

Themes

Greed, appetite and the horrors hidden beneath a respectable city street run through the story. It plays on Victorian anxieties about the anonymous crowd, about what might be happening behind an ordinary shopfront, and about the thin line between commerce and cannibalism. There is dark comedy here too, a relish in its own gruesomeness that later stage and screen versions would happily amplify.

Why it still matters

Every retelling of Sweeney Todd, from Victorian melodrama to the celebrated modern musical, traces back to this serial. It is a cornerstone of popular Gothic and a vivid specimen of the penny dreadful, the cheap, thrilling fiction that fed a newly literate public. Reading the original is a chance to meet a legend before it was polished, in all its crude, compelling energy.

Who it's for

Fans of Gothic horror and true-crime folklore, admirers of the Sweeney Todd story who want its source, and readers who enjoy the delicious excess of Victorian sensation fiction.