Though he has starred in a brace of melodramas, films and a Stephen Sondheim musical, Sweeney Todd has never been the subject of a biography all to himself; and reading this valiant effort, it's easy to see why. The site of the infamous barber's shop has never been satisfactorily identified, nor has the location of the bakery where his accomplice, Margery Lovett, obligingly turned the flesh of his victims into meat pies. Drawing on contemporary sources, most notably the Newgate Calendar, a forerunner of today's tabloids which was devoted exclusively to criminal cases of the most gruesome kind, Haining performs as creditable a reconstruction of the horrible hairdresser as is possible without definitive proofs, providing in the process a glimpse into the barely contained anarchy of late 18th-century London - and a very good reason to give meat pies a wide berth.
Arminta Wallace