Post by cruororism on Oct 12, 2003 9:50:09 GMT
“His voice was soft, his manner mild
He seldom laughed but he often smiled
He’d seen how civilized men behave
He never forgot and he never forgave
Not Sweeney
Not Sweeney Todd
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street…”
“The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” By Stephen Sondheim.
Sweeney Todd was the only child of a pair of silk industry workers who labored in their home in the slum of Stepney. His parents were both alcoholics who placed a desire for gin above everything else in life, and Sweeney quickly learned where he ranked in order of importance to his parents.
Gin Lane by William Hogarth
He wasn’t alone in this regard. Gin, which had recently been introduced to England from the Netherlands, was increasingly becoming the true opiate of the masses. William Hogarth, whose etchings frequently took on a moralistic tone, reveals the upper-class attitude toward the liquor in his artwork, Gin Lane, which features a half-naked drunken woman oblivious to her child, who is falling head first to the ground out of her arms. In the background of Gin Lane, buildings crumble from disrepair, and the devil operates the local pawnshop, which, along with the undertaker’s, represents the only thriving businesses in the district. An emaciated, half-dead skeleton of a man sits in a drunken stupor across from his inebriated wife.
Made from cheap corn and fermented juniper berries, gin was partly responsible for the rising crime and lower life-expectancy in London, where gin mills frequently advertised “drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, clean straw provided.” Beer, wine and sherry were much too expensive for the laboring classes, but Hogarth, in the antithesis to his Gin Lane etching, created another artwork, which shows happy, healthy beer drinkers in a clean, safe neighborhood where the only ramshackle shops are, of course, the undertaker and pawn broker.
“Gin was said to be the drink of the more sedentary trades,” wrote David Hughson in his 1806 History of London. “It was essentially a disease of poverty, so cheap, so warming and brought such forgetfulness of cold and misery.”
Colin Wilson reports that in the year following Sweeney Todd’s birth, eight million gallons of gin were consumed in England, with Londoners responsible for 14 gallons each. As gin consumption increased, so did crime and cruelty. “Pity was a strange and valuable emotion,” wrote Christopher Hibbert in The Roots of Evil. “Unwanted babies were left out in the streets to die or were thrown into dung heaps or open drains; the torture of animals was a popular sport. Cat-dropping, bear-baiting and bull-baiting were as universally enjoyed as throwing at cocks.”
Sweeney Todd obviously did not enjoy a happy childhood, which ended all-too-quickly when he was forced to go to work helping his family load silk threads onto bobbins for the clothing mills. The Todds would never be able to afford the clothes they were making. Flax and wool, not silk, formed the basis for their wardrobes. And their wardrobes, meager as they were, were all the Todd family owned. “The poverty and distress of some of these people is inconceivable; very generally a family in every room with very little bedding, furniture or clothes. The few rags on their backs comprised the principal part of their property,” a contemporary writer said about the silk industry workers.
Young Sweeney grew up in the shadow of the infamous Tower of London, which in his youth had been converted into a museum and the Royal Zoo. Haining reports that Sweeney spent as much time as possible in the tower, where he was fascinated by the displayed instruments of torture, the stories shared by Tower workers, as well as by the cruelty which the zookeepers inflicted on their imprisoned pets. His penchant for violence was further enhanced during the 1758 Silk Workers Riots, where impoverished workers infuriated over the importation of cheap calico, went on the warpath and attacked women wearing the inexpensive cotton cloth imported from India.
By all accounts, contemporary and historic, Sweeney was loved by his mother, beaten and ignored by his father. His mother’s affections, however, weren’t returned: “I was fondled and kissed and called a pretty boy,” he testified in court. “But later I used to wish I was strong enough to throttle her. What the devil did she bring me into this world for unless she had plenty of money to give me so that I might enjoy myself in it?”
The defining moment in young Sweeney’s life occurred when he was 12 or 13 years old. It was one of the coldest winters on record in London, and hundreds of poor people were freezing to death in their homes and on the streets. For his parents, the call of the gin mills was stronger than their dislike of cold, and one evening they went out and left Sweeney Todd alone at home. They never returned. It was unlikely that they knowingly abandoned their only child; Haining supposes that they went out in search of alcohol and either found it and froze to death or died trying to find a drink. In his interrogation following his arrest, Sweeney Todd gave this account of his birth and family: “The church I was christened at burnt down the day after, and all the books burned. My mother and father are dead, and the nurse was hanged and the doctor cut his throat.”
How the young boy managed to survive is a mystery, and the next records pertaining to Sweeney Todd show that the youngster was turned over to the local parish, which was charged with finding apprenticeships for orphans.
