Mrs. Lovett is a fictional character appearing in many adaptations of the story Sweeney Todd, in every version of the story in which she appears, Mrs. Lovett is the business partner, accomplice and sometimes lover of the barber/serial killer Sweeney Todd. After Todd slits the throats of his unsuspecting customer and victim, their bodies are sent to the basement; where they eventually end up in the pies Mrs. Lovett makes and sells from her pie shop near to Todd’s barber shop at 186 Fleet Street, London, next to St. Dunstan's church. The story first appears in the Victorian penny dreadful (a cheap sensationalist fiction, with lurid images, costing a penny, a forerunner in some ways to the modern day graphic novel or comic), ‘The String of Pearls’ from 1846–47. The story of Sweeney Todd was quite possibly based on an older London urban legend; claims that Sweeney Todd was a real person were first made in 1850, and persist to this day.