James Malcolm Rymer
1814–1884
Biography
James Malcolm Rymer was a British writer of penny dreadfuls, the cheap serial fiction sold to working readers in mid-nineteenth-century London. He was born in Clerkenwell, London, on 1 February 1814 into a working-class family of Scottish descent. He seems to have shunned public attention and used several pseudonyms, so details of his life are scarce. He began his literary career in 1842 as editor of the Queen's Magazine, which failed after about five months. He then found steady work with the publisher Edward Lloyd, and his serial Ada the Betrayed (1843) won him a following among readers of the cheap press.
His best-known serials appeared in the People's Periodical and Family Library: Varney the Vampire, which ran from 1845 to 1847, and The String of Pearls, which ran from 1846 to 1847. The second introduced the murderous Sweeney Todd, the barber of Fleet Street, who later became a figure on stage and screen. Lloyd's publications did not carry authors' names, so the authorship of both serials is disputed. Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest are both named as likely authors, and the scholar E. F. Bleiler has argued that Rymer wrote most of Varney.
Rymer died on 11 August 1884 and was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in west London. The site holds The String of Pearls; Or, The Barber of Fleet Street, credited to Rymer together with Thomas Peckett Prest, a credit that reflects how uncertain the serial's authorship is. It is a good place to meet Sweeney Todd in his literary debut, and it shows the melodrama that made the penny serial so popular with its readers.
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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.