It is the 19th century, Benjamin Barker, a skilled barber, returns to London assuming the alias "Sweeney Todd". Fifteen years earlier, Barker had been falsely charged and banished by the corrupt Judge Turpin, who had lusted after his wife, Lucy. At Mrs. Nellie Lovett's meat pie shop on Fleet Street, he learns that Lucy poisoned herself with arsenic after Turpin raped her. Todd's teenage daughter Johanna is now Turpin's ward and, like her mother before her, is the object of Turpin's lust. Todd vows revenge, reopening his barber shop in the upstairs flat after Mrs. Lovett returns his old straight razors to him.