The String of Pearls, Thomas Preskett Prest (?)
In the old-time comic strip Pogo, the citizens of the Okefenokee swamp spent a few days discussing in meta fashion the components of a newspaper. Someone, possibly the turtle Churchy la Femme, asks why the paper even contains a stupid thing like a daily horoscope. Howland Owl astutely replies that astrology is useful because "It tells a man when it's a bad day to get shaved 'cause the barber is 'bout to turn lunatic."
Which brings us to The String of Pearls, the original version of Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett's dodgy pie shop. Later versions expanded the situations, characters, and plot to a three-decker, 800-page epic but here is where the Sweeney Todd franchise began. This is a novella that appeared as a serial from 1846 to 1847. It is a penny dreadful, with emphasis on the dreadful part.
The prose is purpler than the thumb of a cross-eyed carpenter. Short as it is, the plot creeps along randomly, often pausing to catch its breath. "But ere we linger over Johanna's anguished tears, it behooves us to give the reader a minute description of her room, which comprised six surfaces, including a floor, which lay horizontal below all and supported the furnishings, which in due course we shall descent upon in great detail, and next on the four edges of the floor there stood four vertical walls incloasing the rest and serving to keep off alike the burning sun of high summer and eke the bitter icy winds of that season termed by those individuals who speak the English tongue, winter....."
Dreadful indeed. The plot involves the murderous barber Sweeney Todd, described as so repulsive that everyone who meets him instantly realizes he must be evil as hell. So of course when a newly returned sailor, Thornhill, stops in for a shave, he immediately tells the fiendish-looking Todd that a presumed drowned man, Mark Ingestrie, entrusted him with a string of pearls to be delivered to Mark's sweetheart, Johanna Oakley, and these pearls came from oysters so noble they ranked between dukes and earls, and the gol-dang string was valued at 12,000 pounds. In modern terms, that would be the equivalent of the gross national product of Poland.
Sweeney yanks a lever, the chair dumps Thornhill down 20 feet into a secret stone tunnel leading from the barbershop to the burial vaults beneath St Dunstan's to the oven room of Mrs Lovett's pie shop ("Like Mum and Dad used to make!"). Todd relieves the body of the pearls, butchers it, delivers the prime cuts to Mrs Lovett's basement, and in the vaults beneath the church, he dumps the offal.
("I say, Padre, these past Sundays I've noticed a horrid stench in this church."
"So have I. It's awful!"
"Yes, I rather thought it was.")
By the way, Thornhill's loyal dog knows the tea, hangs about for a few chapters accusing Todd of murder, and then vanishes. He has company. A good many human characters show up, go nowhere, and go away. Sprinkle in a ton of poor slop boys, abandoned orphan girls, and random people who drop by to insist on chapter-long digressions, enthusiastically explaining to each other things they both already know, and those god-awful pauses for descriptions, and the result is dreadful. If you want a penny dreadful that gives value for your money, go for Varney the Vampire.
