The story of the vengeful barber Sweeney Todd has gripped fans across literary, stage, and screen renditions—but little has been told of Mrs. Lovett, Todd’s partner in crime. Until now.
Enclosed herewith: a bloodcurdling correspondence of horror and intrigue, based on the original Victorian penny dreadful that started it all.
“Your fingers may bleed with paper cuts as you tear through The Butcher's Daughter . . . I am spellbound."—Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
London, 1887: At the abandoned apartment of a missing young woman, a dossier of evidence is collected, ordered chronologically, and sent to the Chief Inspector of the London Metropolitan Police. It contains a frightening correspondence between an inquisitive journalist, Miss Emily Gibson, and the woman Gibson thinks may be the infamous Mrs. Lovett—Sweeney Todd’s accomplice, “a wicked woman” who baked men into pies and sold them in her pie shop on Fleet Street. The talk of London Town—even decade
