A barber from Fleet Street, Todd murders his customers with a straight razor and gives their corpses to Mrs. Lovett, his partner in crime, who bakes their flesh into meat pies.

[7][8] During February/March 1847, before the serial was even completed, George Dibdin Pitt adapted The String of Pearls as a melodrama for the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton, east London.

[9] In 1875, Frederick Hazleton's c. 1865 dramatic adaptation Sweeney Todd, the Barber of Fleet Street: or the String of Pearls (see below) was published as volume 102 of Lacy's Acting Edition of Plays.

In Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers (1836–1837), the servant Sam Weller says that a pieman used cats "for beefsteak, veal, and kidney, 'cording to the demand", and recommends that people should buy pies only "when you know the lady as made it, and is quite sure it ain't kitten.

"[12] Dickens then developed this in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844), published two years before the appearance of Sweeney Todd in The String of Pearls (1846–1847), with a character named Tom Pinch who is grateful that his own "evil genius did not lead him into the dens of any of those preparers of cannibalic pastry, who are represented in many country legends as doing a lively retail business in the metropolis".

[4][5][6] A late 1890s reference to the legend of the murderous barber can be found in the poem by the Australian bush poet Banjo Paterson, "The Man from Ironbark".

In Cozette de Charmoy's 1973 "collage novel", The True Life of Sweeney Todd, the character appears as a politically aware figure of social satire.

[14] In his 2012 novel Dodger, Terry Pratchett portrays Sweeney Todd as a tragic character, having lost his mind after being exposed to the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars as a barber surgeon.