MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In the nineteenth century, the harshest critics of the cheap fiction known as the penny dreadful recognized that it gave the poor and working classes a means to explore and indulge socio-political anxieties and desires: offering an escape from reality, whether mundane or horrific, through sensational crimes of villainous villains peopling The City’s darkest recesses, was not a fantasy, a means to appease the “masses,” but an actual threat to the existing social system. It is this response that turned cheap fiction into weapons in real conflicts, both the highbrow/lowbrow culture wars and those between the once-analogous higher and lower social classes. The anonymously authored The String of Pearls, more popularly known as Sweeney Todd, is a particularly graphic assault on both good taste and the status quo.

A String of Pearls isn’t a very good book, but its story has endured: rewritten more than once and, most famously, set to music, the original tale was published serially during the period known as the Hungry 40s, when widespread industrialization and attendant overcrowded urbanization, coupled with agrarian blight, contributed to conditions that culminated in the revolutions of 1848 throughout Europe. Where there was no revolution, there were shilling weeklies marketed to the “undiscriminating” working classes and foregrounding sensational fiction and romances rather than current events. While Stephen Sondheim’s more popular version is one of near-justified revenge and madness, the original inverts the metaphor of the rapacious capitalist devouring the flesh of his workers, implicates the middle and upper classes in a violation of one of the strictest taboos universally acknowledged, and shows the meaninglessness of class boundaries when appearance rather than personal knowledge is one’s measure. As such, A String of Pearls was a greater threat to those in power than they might have realized.