Sweeney Todd is a fictional character who first appeared as the murderer of the Victorian penny dreadful The String of Pearls (1846–47). In 1979, he was introduced as an antihero in the musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and its 2007 film adaptation of the same name. Claims that Sweeney Todd was a historical person are strongly disputed by scholars, although possible legendary prototypes exist.
In the original version of the tale, Todd is a barber who dispatches his victims by pulling a lever as they sit in his barber chair. His victims fall backward down a revolving trapdoor into the basement of his shop, generally causing them to break their necks or skulls. In case they are alive, Todd goes to the basement and "polishes them off" (slitting their throats with his straight razor). In some adaptations, the murdering process is reversed, with Todd slitting his customers' throats before dispatching them into the basement via the revolving trapdoor. After Todd has robbed his dead victims of their goods, Mrs. Lovett, his partner in crime (in some later versions, his friend and/or lover), assists him in disposing of the bodies by baking their flesh into meat pies and selling them to the unsuspecting customers of her pie shop. Todd's barber shop is situated at 186 Fleet Street, London, next to St. Dunstan's church, and is connected to Mrs. Lovett's pie shop in nearby Bell Yard by means of an underground passage. In most versions of the story, he and Mrs. Lovett hire an unwitting orphan boy, Tobias Ragg, to serve the pies to customers.
Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land is a nine-county metropolitan area defined by the Office of Management and Budget. It is located along the Gulf Coast region in the U.S. state of Texas. The metropolitan area is colloquially referred to as "Greater Houston" and is situated in Southeast Texas.
Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land is the fifth-largest metropolitan area in the United States with a population of 6.18 million, as of U.S. Census Bureau's July 1, 2012 estimates. The population of the metropolitan area is centered in the city of Houston—the largest economic and cultural center of the American South, with a population of 2.1 million.
Sweeny is a city in Brazoria County, Texas, USA. The population was 3,684 at the 2010 census. The city's motto is "A City With Pride", and is the westernmost incorporated town in the county.
