Thomas Peckett Prest
c. 1810–1859
Biography
Thomas Peckett Prest was a British author, journalist and musician, whose dates are only roughly known and usually given as about 1810 to 1859. He had made a name for himself as a talented musician before he joined the publishing house of Edward Lloyd in London. Lloyd's firm issued cheap serial fiction known as penny dreadfuls, and Prest became one of its most prolific writers.
He was known as a skilled writer of horror and was noted for a style close to Dickens's. He wrote under pseudonyms, one of them Bos, a play on the pen name 'Boz' that Dickens used. He is now remembered as the co-creator, with James Malcolm Rymer, of Sweeney Todd, the 'demon barber', who first appeared in The String of Pearls. The two men also wrote Varney the Vampire together.
The String of Pearls; Or, The Barber of Fleet Street, credited to him with Rymer, is the book on this site and the work in which the barber first appeared. Readers who know the character from later stage and screen versions will find the penny-serial original here. The sources below give the details of Prest's career.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
The String of Pearls; Or, The Barber of Fleet Street. A Domestic Romance.
by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest
The Victorian penny dreadful that gave the world Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, first serialised in 1846-47. A reader finds missing customers, a pie shop nearby and breathless, lurid melodrama. This book uses the racial and other slurs of its period as written…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.