‘His knife and hands bloody’: Sweeney Todd’s journey from page to stage – melodrama, adaptation and the original 1847 manuscript

The Victorian stage life of Sweeney Todd, evolving from George Dibdin Pitt’s adaptation in 1847, has been fairly widely discussed in nineteenth-century theatre scholarship. However, the majority of previous examinations focus on a version of Dibdin Pitt’s melodrama available in John Dicks’ collection of plays from 1883. A much earlier manuscript from 1847 is archived in the British Library’s Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Collection, which became more openly accessible when Sharon Aronofsky Weltman reproduced the entire text in her special journal issue on the play (2011). The manuscript reveals that the inaugural text and performances starkly contrast with the 1883 version. Apart from Weltman’s publication, to date there has been minute critical attention to the 1847 text. This article offers a close analysis of the adaptation processes from Edward Lloyd’s penny blood to the melodramatic reworking, in order to provide the necessary re-examination of a canonical example of a Victorian stage villain. The transition in 1847 demonstrates how and why Todd took centre-stage, the synergy between Dibdin Pitt’s adaptation of the character and contemporary anxieties over urban crime, and that the barber’s theatre debut was the catalyst for fuelling his urban legend, which still remains in the present day.