Sweeney Todd is a barber who murders his customers and turns their remains into meat pies sold at the pie shop of Mrs. Lovett, his partner in crime. His barber shop is situated in Fleet Street, London, next to St. Dunstan's church, and is connected to Lovett's pie shop in nearby Bell Yard by means of an underground passage. Todd dispatches his victims by pulling a lever while they are in his barber chair, which makes them fall backward down a revolving trapdoor and generally causes them to break their necks or skulls on the cellar floor below. If the victims are still alive, he goes to the basement and "polishes them off" by slitting their throats with his straight razor.

James Malcolm Rymer (1814–1884) was a British nineteenth century writer of dreadfuls, and is the co-author with Thomas Peckett Prest of both Varney the Vampire and The String of Pearls, in which the notorious villain Sweeney Todd makes his literary debut.