for all you aspiring barber/mass-murderers out there.
First, resist the urge to take on an inquisitive young apprentice in your barbershop. Sure, the extra couple bucks a week will come in handy, and it's always nice to have someone to run errands, sweep up the hair from the barbershop floor, and to terrorize with vague threats about his mother -- but what about peace of mind? There's nothing a barber/mass-murderer needs more than peace of mind if he hopes for a long, remunerative and spirtually fulfilling career.
Second, before you really get underway with your business of shaving chins and slitting throats, make arrangements with a good fence. Take that extra effort to find the right man. That way, when you murder a mysterious sailor who happens to be carrying a fabulously expensive string of pearls as a present for his dead companion's fiancee, you won't be subjected to the hazardous and difficult business of trying to sell them yourself, and will be saved the embarrassment and effort of being first chased down the streets of London by an excitable mob, and then up a tenement stairwell by a throng of bloodthirsty robbers, beating them back with only a mop for a weapon. It's just this kind of tedious and unnecessary business that brings premature grey hairs to so many barber/mass-murderers you meet.
(Contrariwise, if you're a young fellow who's been apprenticed to a barber, and you begin to suspect him of being a mass-murderer on an unprecedented scale but can't do anything about it because he's blackmailing your poor mother, don't walk around the shop soliloquizing when you think you're alone. Of course he's going to pop out from behind a doorway, having overheard you. That's what barber/mass-murderers do. Any time they're not barbering or mass-murdering, they're happily crouching behind doorways, waiting for good opportunities to pop out. There's a little thing I like to call "thinking to yourself, without speaking out loud." You should try it some time.)
First, resist the urge to take on an inquisitive young apprentice in your barbershop. Sure, the extra couple bucks a week will come in handy, and it's always nice to have someone to run errands, sweep up the hair from the barbershop floor, and to terrorize with vague threats about his mother -- but what about peace of mind? There's nothing a barber/mass-murderer needs more than peace of mind if he hopes for a long, remunerative and spirtually fulfilling career.
Second, before you really get underway with your business of shaving chins and slitting throats, make arrangements with a good fence. Take that extra effort to find the right man. That way, when you murder a mysterious sailor who happens to be carrying a fabulously expensive string of pearls as a present for his dead companion's fiancee, you won't be subjected to the hazardous and difficult business of trying to sell them yourself, and will be saved the embarrassment and effort of being first chased down the streets of London by an excitable mob, and then up a tenement stairwell by a throng of bloodthirsty robbers, beating them back with only a mop for a weapon. It's just this kind of tedious and unnecessary business that brings premature grey hairs to so many barber/mass-murderers you meet.
(Contrariwise, if you're a young fellow who's been apprenticed to a barber, and you begin to suspect him of being a mass-murderer on an unprecedented scale but can't do anything about it because he's blackmailing your poor mother, don't walk around the shop soliloquizing when you think you're alone. Of course he's going to pop out from behind a doorway, having overheard you. That's what barber/mass-murderers do. Any time they're not barbering or mass-murdering, they're happily crouching behind doorways, waiting for good opportunities to pop out. There's a little thing I like to call "thinking to yourself, without speaking out loud." You should try it some time.)
~
When we first meet Sweeney Todd, he's far more comic gargoyle than sinister uber-villain; he's tall, skinny and misshapen, a coward and a bully -- with the emphasis very much on coward. A little later (during the pearl-fencing adventure mentioned above) he takes on a kind of swashbuckling, daring and resourceful character for a couple chapters -- also suddenly displaying an almost superhuman strength, tossing grown men through plate glass windows without even slowing his pace. Then he suddenly goes back to the cowardly bully we first met. Then he suddenly develops a penchant for ludicrous disguises (including, hilariously, a habit of wearing a mask, but only while stalking his dimly-lit underground tunnels to which no one else has access anyway -- apparently he doesn't want to risk having the rats identify him in court one day).
Now (I'm about halfway through the book) he's showing signs of turning into a criminal mastermind, even though up to this point he's never displayed more than slightly below-average intelligence. All of which might suggest multiple-authorship, but it might just as easily be evidence of rapid, improvised and alcoholic composition. Anyway, what do you expect for a penny? Consistency?
None of it matters. The true fascination of the book isn't in Sweeney's slaughters (and it sure as hell isn't in the god-awful comic and sentimental subplots, ripped straight out of Pickwick and Dombey and Son respectively), but in Mrs Lovett's pies. The author[s] love to linger on how popular these meat pies are -- a regular phenomenon -- how everyone from high to low, poor to rich, suburbs to City, enjoy them. So succulent, so tender, so flavourful! And the high point of the book so far -- by far -- has been the description of the vast underground cellar where the pies are made: thousands upon thousands of pies produced daily by a single, imprisoned homeless man working a series of crazy infernal machines (the story's set in 1785, remember), and slowly starting to realize where the supply of meat is coming from. And what's that shadow falling across his shoulder? He turns on his stool and sees a masked man raising a hammer....
There are two really interesting things here. The obvious one is cannibalism in the popular imagination. The one that I wasn't expecting when I started the book, is the fascination with machinery, and the equation of machinery with evil. There's more loving detail expended on Mrs Lovett's automated pie-making machines than on Sweeney's murders; and I'm eagerly awaiting the passage that explains Sweeney's barber-chair. I want to talk more about this later; remind me, will you?
Now (I'm about halfway through the book) he's showing signs of turning into a criminal mastermind, even though up to this point he's never displayed more than slightly below-average intelligence. All of which might suggest multiple-authorship, but it might just as easily be evidence of rapid, improvised and alcoholic composition. Anyway, what do you expect for a penny? Consistency?
None of it matters. The true fascination of the book isn't in Sweeney's slaughters (and it sure as hell isn't in the god-awful comic and sentimental subplots, ripped straight out of Pickwick and Dombey and Son respectively), but in Mrs Lovett's pies. The author[s] love to linger on how popular these meat pies are -- a regular phenomenon -- how everyone from high to low, poor to rich, suburbs to City, enjoy them. So succulent, so tender, so flavourful! And the high point of the book so far -- by far -- has been the description of the vast underground cellar where the pies are made: thousands upon thousands of pies produced daily by a single, imprisoned homeless man working a series of crazy infernal machines (the story's set in 1785, remember), and slowly starting to realize where the supply of meat is coming from. And what's that shadow falling across his shoulder? He turns on his stool and sees a masked man raising a hammer....
There are two really interesting things here. The obvious one is cannibalism in the popular imagination. The one that I wasn't expecting when I started the book, is the fascination with machinery, and the equation of machinery with evil. There's more loving detail expended on Mrs Lovett's automated pie-making machines than on Sweeney's murders; and I'm eagerly awaiting the passage that explains Sweeney's barber-chair. I want to talk more about this later; remind me, will you?
