Rebecca Nesvet

Sweeney Todd in Victorian Popular Culture: Myth, Meme, and Media, 1836-1946

Sweeney Todd in Victorian Popular Culture: Myth, Meme, and Media 1836-1946 (for Anthem Press, 2029) is the first handbook to the Victorian Sweeney Todd transmedia storyworld. Often erroneously assumed a historical figure, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street in fact originated in Victorian popular fiction and is derived significantly from a source thus far neglected by scholars: cheap print reinventions of the medieval anti-Jewish Blood Libel. I show that this toxic, viral myth informs the original Victorian Sweeney Todd serial (James Malcolm Rymer’s The String of Pearls: A Romance, 1846-7) and that aspects of it endure in subsequent Victorian variations. After Rymer, Sweeney Todd quickly became an analog meme, which evolved to serve a variety of commercial, artistic, and ideological goals through Victorian popular media including prose fiction, illustration, and theatre. Shaped and haunted by hatred, the Victorian Sweeney Todd meme channeled anxieties about metropolitan diversity, imperialism, and industrial modernity, but also helped London to fight back against bigotry, hypocrisy, and Fascism.

Rebecca Nesvet is the author of James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family (Routledge 2023), winner of the 2026 Victorian Popular Fiction Association’s First Book Prize. Written during a UW System Fellowship at IRH in 2022-2023 and supported in part by grants from the Lilly Library and Huntington Foundation, this book is the first monograph on ‘Sweeney Todd’s’ phenomenally popular Victorian working-class creator. She has also published on Rymer, Sweeney Todd, “penny dreadfuls” and the Victorian penny press in various journals and edited Rymer’s penny dreadful A Mystery in Scarlet, which Robert Louis Stevenson admired, for COVE Editions. She serves as Book Reviews Editor of the Journal for Undergraduate Research in the Humanities and co-editor of the journal Book 2.0.