Who Was Mr. Lovett? Unpacking a Mystery of ‘Sweeney Todd’
At the end of 2020, when the world seemed to be on the brink of complete collapse, I found myself consumed with one particularly inconsequential question.
What happened to Mr. Lovett in “Sweeney Todd”?
If you, like me, are in desperate need of a mystery to distract yourself from doom scrolling for a few minutes, this piece is for you. I promise it is juicer than you’re expecting.
For those of you who haven’t spent the last six months knee-deep in all things Sondheim (information on my upcoming book on his longtime music director Paul Gemignani can be found here) here is a refresher.
Nellie Lovett, otherwise known as Mrs. Lovett, is the owner of “Lovett’s Famous Meat Pie Shop” in 1785 London. She is referred to by almost every character within the musical Sweeney Todd as “Mrs. Lovett”, including Sweeney himself, who stays in the flat above her shop, committing his murderous misdeeds. She knew Sweeney prior to his imprisonment, when he went by Benjamin Barker, and knew his wife Lucy. She can be equal parts manic and maternal and is the one to suggest they begin turning Sweeney’s victims into meat pies in order to bolster her business. In the end, she is killed by Sweeney, after having lied to him about the whereabouts of his wife, Lucy, due to her own infatuation with Sweeney.
Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett originated as the villains in the Victorian penny dreadful “The String of Pearls: A Domestic Romance”, published serially in 1846 and 1847. Immensely popular, the characters of Sweeney and Lovett took on a folkloric quality, appearing in a number of plays, films, and radio plays. There is even a full-length ballet, and the term Sweeney Todd became cockney rhyming slang for the Metropolitan Police Flying Squad. Throughout all of these various takes on the characters, one glaring plot detail has been left unexplored.
The identity of Mr. Lovett, Mrs. Lovett’s missing husband.
Only one adaptation references his existence - Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Sweeney Todd. A reference is given in the scene prior to Sweeney’s first kill - "It's not much of a chair, but it'll do till you get your fancy new one. It was me poor Albert's chair, it was. Sat in it all day long he did, after his leg give out from the dropsy." Later, as Mrs. Lovett lays out her plans to marry Sweeney in “By The Sea” she states "You know, it's seventeen years this Whitsun since my poor Albert passed on. I don't see why I shouldn't be married in white, do you?". In the Tim Burton film of the musical, an additional line is added - “Reminds me of my dear Albert. Liked to gorge himself to bloatation, he did. He didn't have your nice head of hair, though.” A photograph of Helena Bonham Carter’s driver, Harry Taylor, is shown in reference to Mr. Lovett, and he is not mentioned again.
Harry Taylor as Mr. Albert Lovett in Sweeney Todd 2007
Our facts are these -
● Mrs. Lovett’s husband, Albert, is out of the picture prior to the events of Sweeney Todd (and he has supposedly been dead for 17 years, 2 years prior to her meeting Sweeney and his wife Lucy, when he still went by Benjamin Barker).
● Albert was a man of considerable size, and she claims that he died of “dropsy”, which in modern parlance would be either gout or edema (an edema is essentially the swelling and accumulation of fluid in the lower legs, and is a symptom of diabetes and congestive heart failure)
● Albert must have had some kind of finance or enterprise, as Mrs. Lovett owns property by the time we see her at the start of Sweeney Todd, which is something she would not have been able to do unless it had been willed to her by her husband (women were unable to purchase property in their own name until 1882).
● Their marriage appears to have been childless, and there are no extended relatives to speak of.
With these four facts in mind, I have come up with three separate theories.
Theory #1: Death by Natural Causes
Albert was a middle-aged butcher who died of congestive heart failure. Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop, as designed in the original Broadway production, has a similar set up to that of a traditional butcher shop within central London. With a butcher block counter, an industrial meat grinder in the cellar, and signage referring to “LOVETT’S” with a “MRS.” subtly curled over the corner, it is not much of a stretch to imagine that the original text underneath the pasted over font in the set design once read “LOVETT’S FAMOUS MEAT MARKET”. To be a butcher was a solid, lucrative job in Georgian London - as one of the only consistent trade professions, such a position was competitive, and prosperous. If Lovett had been in her early 20’s when she married him, it would’ve been considered a very successful marriage match - as the owner of his own shop, with an attached flat, she was essentially set for life.
A diet consisting mainly of red meat would account for the heart trouble, and his early death would have left Mrs. Lovett widowed in plenty of time for her to have taken control of his tools to construct her pie shop business (as the wife of a butcher, she had likely been making him meat pies regularly, and would have been able to simply expand the practice to the public sector). She would have known of Albert’s meat suppliers and would have been able to use them as the sources for her meat pies, likely skating by on bottom barrel prices given to her out of pity.
With this newfound independence, she could have operated alone until Benjamin Barker’s arrival. Barker’s presence in business as a barber would have made immediate sense with being paired with a butcher shop - the two professions worked in tandem during the 18th century, and their combination would have been suitable. The pity of Albert’s suppliers likely ran out within the 17 years between his death and the beginning of Sweeney Todd, which would have caused her to have fallen on increasingly harder times due to not being able to afford higher prices for meat to put into her pies. Mrs. Lovett would have known how to butcher Sweeney’s human victims from watching her husband, and her ability to swiftly process the corpses can be attributed to assisting Albert with the carcasses of cattle.
Theory #2: Killed by Nellie
Nellie killed her husband early in their marriage. Her cleverness with poisons is documented - in the original penny dreadful, she supplies various poisons to various purposes, none of which are ever identified. Poison was often considered the “women’s weapon”, and was easily accessible to wives under the guise of housekeeping - rat poison, arsenic, and other noxious mixtures would have been easily available and untraceable in 1768, 17 years prior to the events of the musical. Now, why she would have killed him is up for endless debate - perhaps he was abusive, perhaps she wanted the property for herself, or perhaps she just wanted him out of the way. Regardless of her motivation, it would have been her easiest option - arsenic poisoning could explain the redness and swelling associated with dropsy, as topical application can cause hives and liaisons on the skin, as well as hypertension if ingested. She could have passed his death off as an unexplained illness, and carried on, never the wiser.
Should this theory hold weight, there is also the affair of Lucy and the arsenic to consider. Sweeney Todd’s wife consumes liquid arsenic after he is sent to Australia, and she is raped by the Judge. Within this theory, it follows that she would have been given the arsenic by her neighbor, Mrs. Lovett. It would explain why Nellie knows the intimate details of what Lucy did following the rape, and why she knows that Lucy only drank enough to go insane - if Lovett was with her at the time, she would have witnessed Lucy’s descent into madness, and retreat to the streets as the Beggar Woman. Mrs. Lovett’s own exposure to the arsenic could explain her more erratic behaviors, as physical contact with arsenic can cause slow onset madness.
There is, of course, the idea that she killed Albert through some fashion other than poison, which would have made his body useable in ways a poisoned body would not - Mrs. Lovett comes upon the idea of turning Sweeney’s victims into ground meat fairly quickly - perhaps she killed Albert in a panic during some domestic squabble, or perhaps by accident, and she fed him through the meat grinder in order to get rid of the body - whether she made the jump from disposing of a body to capitalistic cannibalism prior to the events of Sweeney Todd is up to you.
Theory #3: No Albert At All
There was never an Albert. The reason Sweeney does not remember him from his time as Benjamin Barker is because he never existed. Mrs. Lovett assumed the matron moniker without ever being married in order to legitimize her business - documents could have been easily falsified in order to establish her widowed status, and her shop, which is located in a particularly rundown area of London in 1785, could actually belong to a different titleholder, who is unaware of her presence (a number of properties were left in escrow after the events of the Seven Years War, making it possible for her to essentially be a squatter tenant).
She may have been a runaway or a failed servant - the title of Mrs. was colloquially applied to the live-in cooks of the wealthy, and she could have continued on with the title even after being fired, or ousted due to the death of her employer. A Georgian establishment would have been seen as unseemly if run by an unmarried woman, and by assuming the Mrs. title, she would have been able to live out her life unbothered, concocting a vague story of an older man named Albert who died of an even vaguer condition, dropsy.
The song “By The Sea” makes particular sense in this theory - Mrs. Lovett dreams of a simple married life, away from London and the constant fear of being found out as a fraud as business begins to boom, which risks drawing the attention of officials. Her desire to wear a white wedding gown would make perfect sense, as it would have been her first wedding, and her marrying Sweeney would have solved all of her legal woes, with the added bonus of her infatuation.
(Nevermind that white wedding gowns were not en vogue until Queen Victoria’s wedding in 1840, 55 years after the events of Sweeney Todd.)
Of course, all three of these theories are pure conjecture, based on practical research and application of historical trends. His identity, and subsequent disappearance are functionally inconsequential - however, I believe that this piece of backstory can completely change different interpretations of Mrs. Lovett, and I have deeply enjoyed viewing various productions with these theories in mind over the past three weeks.
Who do you think Mrs. Lovett was? A desperate widow, a nefarious poisoner, or an opportunistic squatter? If you have an alternate theory as to the identity of Mr. Lovett, please feel free to sound off in the comments.
“A woman alone. With limited wind. And the worst pies in London.! Ah, sir. Times is hard. Times is hard!”