tailieunhanh - Ebook Nineteenth centurypopular fiction, medicineand anatomy: Part 2

(BQ) Part 2 book “Nineteenth centurypopular fiction, medicineand anatomy” has contents: Dissection report – Patterns of medicine and ethics; the unknown labyrinth - Radicalism, the body, and the anatomy act in the mysteries of london; underground truths - sweeney todd, cannibalism, and discourse control. | CHAPTER 4 Underground Truths: Sweeney Todd, Cannibalism, and Discourse Control On the 21st of November 1846, the weekly issue of Lloyd’s People’s Periodical and Family Library featured the first instalment of a series innocently titled The String of Pearls. Under the title, a broad illustration showed a weeping girl sitting at a kitchen table, in the company of a gentleman. The gentleman’s expression is concerned, and a little dog anxiously looks at the distressed girl. The domestic scene is carefully crafted to attract the reader’s attention, hinting at an exciting story behind the girl’s tears. Yet, nothing transpires from the illustration, or the title, about the lurid story of human flesh-pies better known to us as Sweeney Todd, The Demon-Barber of Fleet Street. The disappearance of the string of pearls from the title of subsequent rewritings and adaptations is unsurprising, as the jewel soon ceases to have a key role in the story, overcome by the striking presence of one of Victorian popular fiction’s most formidable villains: the ‘demon’ barber Sweeney Todd. Similar to other penny blood villains, the barber is a murderer, a robber, and a cunning cheater; what singles him out, making his callousness transcend humanity and become demonic, is his role as the facilitator and chief supplier of a ghastly business partnership with his pie-maker neighbour, Mrs. Lovett. In this chapter, I explore how this partnership reflected the discourses and spaces of the Anatomy Act, and the imaginary—and not-so-imaginary— horrors of bodily disintegration in the Victorian metropolis. © The Author(s) 2019 A. Gasperini, Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine and Anatomy, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, 129 130  A. GASPERINI The barber murders his customers, the ones who will not be immediately missed, such as merchants or sailors, and who happen to be in possession of sums of money or valuables. Todd .