The String of Pearls Or, The Barber of Fleet Street. A Domestic Romance.

James Malcolm RymerProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.5
Word count
2.4M words
Chapters
236

Tags

English Originals Horror and Thriller Suspense ThrillerCriminal PsychologyScreen AdaptationPopular NarrativeLondon UnderclassVictorian Era

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The String of Pearls; Or, The Barber of Fleet Street. A Domestic Romance. by Prest et al.Author: Rymer, James Malcolm, 1814?-1884,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jun 28, 2019

Editor's review

The String of Pearls; or, The Barber of Fleet Street: A Domestic Romance is an English popular novel by James Malcolm Rymer and others, available as a public-domain e-book from Project Gutenberg. Centered on Sweeney Todd, the barber of Fleet Street, it blends urban schemes for profit, mysterious disappearances, and domestic romance; the plot advances through serial-style suspense and coincidence, with the distinctive flavor of Victorian popular fiction. Its value lies in showing the early fictional form of the Sweeney Todd material and offering insight into the textual origins of the figure and the techniques of popular literature. Read it as melodrama rather than realistic social fiction, and note the pacing and the sharply divided good and evil characters. The e-book is easy to search by chapter, suiting serial reading or thematic comparison; do not expect subtle psychological portrayal.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read chapter by chapter and note the suspense hook at each chapter's end to appreciate the serial rhythm.
  2. Briefly learn the background of Fleet Street and the Sweeney Todd material beforehand to grasp the character setup.
  3. Treat melodramatic coincidence and sharply divided good and evil characters as features of the style, not flaws to judge by realist standards.
  4. Compare with later adaptations and record changes in the figure and shifts in narrative focus.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

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FAQ

What is the relationship between this book and the musical Sweeney Todd? This book is one of the early fictional texts of the Sweeney Todd material. The musical and later adaptations draw on it for characters and plot, but their specific treatment differs greatly. Read it as an early narrative form of the material, not as the script or retelling of an adaptation.
Is this a horror novel? It is closer to Victorian popular melodrama, with elements of murder for gain, mysterious disappearances, and domestic romance. It has thriller elements, but the narrative focuses on suspense and coincidence rather than modern psychological horror. Readers sensitive to bloody content should look into it before deciding.
How difficult is the English, and is it suitable for reading practice? The text is a nineteenth-century English popular novel with long sentences and clear serial traces; difficulty is above average. Readers with some English foundation can read it chapter by chapter and use a dictionary to sort out character relationships; beginners are better off starting with a simplified version or introductory material before the original.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

James Malcolm Rymer Author · British · 1814–1884

James Malcolm Rymer (1814?–1884) was a British writer of Victorian penny dreadfuls. He was born on 1 February 1814 in Clerkenwell, London, of Scottish descent, and died on 11 August 1884. He wrote some 115 serial novels for the publisher Edward Lloyd, including Varney the Vampire and The String of Pearls, in which Sweeney Todd first appeared, as well as Ada, the Betrayed. He mostly published under pseudonyms, and public information about him is limited, with few biographical details; scholars still differ on his identity and name. Since the late twentieth century, his place in literary history has been reassessed, and he is now regarded as an important figure in the study of Victorian popular fiction and the Gothic horror tradition. His works often deal with mystery, crime and the supernatural, written as serialized fiction for a mass readership.