“Like a polish’d razor keen”: Sweeney Todd, Figaro in London, and Transmedia Satire

The art of caricature is essential to Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street: A Musical Thriller, so much so that its 1979 world premiere can be understood as a time-based, three-dimensional caricature. This article contends that Robert Seymour’s caricature masthead of Figaro in London informs James Malcolm Rymer’s Victorian Sweeney Todd serial The String of Pearls and that subsequent contributions to the Sweeney Todd transmedia universe revive nineteenth-century caricature, often characterising Sweeney Todd as a personification of satire itself. Cozette de Charmoy’s collage novel The True Life of Sweeney Todd (London: Gaberbocchus Press, 1973) is a particularly insightful and original contribution to this tradition.