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Benjamin Barker is the happiest man in London. At least, that’s what anyone who knows the barber thinks. The man is still young and handsome, and he’s widely known as the best barber in the city, perhaps in the world. Even upper-class gentlemen sometimes send for him, and in their private residences they present their bare throats for his razor, and he gives them the closest shave anyone can give. His blade never draws one drop of blood.
He has the most joyful and beautiful wife, even if time has whitened some of her yellow hair. And after all these years she still wakes up and looks at him with a face full of love and adoring. Of course, they had some hard times in their past. Many years ago, a judge fancied sweet Lucy, and stalked her with flowers and gifts and a gilded cage, but she never faltered, and eventually his interest in her was lost. But even during those days, Benjamin Barker never lost his faith on his wife, and his love for her is so great his soft heart strains and bleeds to hold it all in.
He has a daughter who is just as beautiful as her mother once was, a fast-talking little thing who sings like a free bird soaring through the sky. But lately a young sailor has been hanging around the barber shop, and she too looks at him with love and longing in her eyes. Benjamin knows that someday he will lose her, maybe to this young sailor, and even though it breaks his heart, Johanna’s happiness is his happiness.
Benjamin Barker should be the happiest man in London, but there are nights he dreams of blood.
So much blood, pouring from the walls of the city, bubbling from the ground and the sewers, as he runs through the dark and grimy streets, with all the whores, and the lunatics, and the beggars cackling and calling him from the alleys. So much blood he drowns on it like it’s a stormy sea. And down deep he finds throat-slitted corpses who pull him under and scream in silent voices. He dreams he killed them all.
There are nights he dreams he cuts the throat of a head full of yellow hair. The blood that flows is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
He always wakes up soaked in cold sweat, heart pounding in his chest and a scream cutting his own throat. He doesn’t wake his wife, and instead wanders in his parlor, staring outside the window at the cold indifferent moon and the stars that guard the secrets of this world. And he’s scared.
Sometimes, the dreams slip through the nights into the days. He gets lost staring at his own hands, thinking of the things they could be capable of. He indulges in thoughts of violence he would never dare to do. Strangling. Cutting. Stabbing. And he’s scared of himself.
Enters a customer, and he traces his blade ever so gently on their neck, thinking how easy it would be, with just a flick of his wrist and he could take a life, easy as pie. They wouldn’t even be able to scream. And then he shivers, and his left hand holds his right arm. He doesn’t know where those thoughts come from.
He walks around the streets of London, and his eyes are tinted red, and he can see only the filth, the ugliness, the wickedness. His heart is filled with contempt for the world, and thoughts that ought to shame a Christian man fill his head. He thinks of how he could let the blood flow and deliver them all from their sins. How he could avenge their suffering by slaughtering the leeches that exploit them.
His barbershop is located over a pie shop in Fleet Street, always has been. Between new dresses for Lucy and dolls for Johanna he never bothered to save enough money to move to a better place. He and the owner, the widower Nellie Lovett, have a good business symbiosis. Every man who comes for shave stays for her famous pies. Business is good for her, and lately she’s been talking about hiring a boy to help her with the work. Still, sometimes she mutters that meat is always getting more and more expensive, and that there must be another way to fill her pies. He doesn’t know what she means by that. Doesn’t want to know.
Sometimes she looks at him with a hunger he recognizes. A hunger that mirrors his own. Sometimes he lusts for the wicked woman, who’s not pure nor beautiful like his Lucy but who’s smart and practical and seems to be made of the blood and meat and bones of many, many men.
But he can’t deny that, above all, he hungers and lusts and craves for blood. Always more blood.
Benjamin Barker dreams he’s someone else, but he doesn’t know who he could be, if not himself. In his dreams, the blade never feels strange in his hand, not even when he swings it and slashes and kills the living pulse of men. The opposite, he feels he’s only doing what he was always meant to do, but never knew he could. He feels that the name he bears in his dreams is much more his than his own Christian name.
When he wakes up, Benajmin Barker hates this other man, this Sweeney Todd, who steals his real dreams, Benjamin Barker’s golden dreams of happiness and purity and love and replaces them with his own wicked, filthy, and dark dreams of blood and hate and murder and revenge. But Sweeney’s hunger and hate are Benjamin’s, and he can’t escape them.
Somewhere, Sweeney Todd sleeps the sleep of the just. He dreams of the life he never had with his wife and daughter, surrounded by their love, which is rightfully his, and he’s at peace for a while.
And Benjamin Barker dreams he drowns in blood.