011: Sweeney Todd ch. 33-36 and HUGE NEWS! Plus Varney the Vampyre, and more flash.

BIG DOINGS! This week, in addition to plundering Sweeney Todd, we're adding Varney the Vampyre to the show. Next week, we'll add Black Bess; or, The Knight of the Road and Spring-Heel'd Jack, the Terror of London and The Black Band; or, The Mysteries of Midnight to the line-up. We can't wait!

FIRST we'll learn what "bursters," "Mrs. Jones's counting-house," "Knights of the Hod," "Moonshine," and "Nob-thatchers" were in highwayman slang.

THEN — in today's reading from Sweeney Todd ...

• WE SEE TOBIAS cover the entire distance from Peckham Rye to downtown London — that, by the way, is a little over 20 miles – at a dead run. By chance he drops from exhaustion at the feet of none other than Colonel Jeffery — who promptly takes him in. A doctor is sent for, but Tobias has PTSD and everyone despairs of restoring him to sanity.
• MEANWHILE, Johanna has put on her disguise and, dressed as a boy, walks down Fleet-Street with her friend Arabella. Arabella gets noticed by a foppish young law clerk with a dirty cravat, who starts deploying pickup-artist lines on her (that's him behind the girls in the episode art for this week) and boxes Johanna’s ears for “him” to try to get Arabella alone ... luckily, Big Ben the beefeater is close by!
• AND FINALLY, back at the asylum, Messrs. Fogg and Watson murder Tobias’s poor friend and benefactor by throwing her into an old well. But then Watson starts blackmailing Fogg ... yeah, that’ll end well, don’t you think?

IN CHAPTER 1 of Varney, the Vampyre, a delightfully campy Dark and Stormy Night situation is enlivened by the visit of a sinister, horrid vampyre to the bedchamber of a lovely young maiden. Horrors! Horrors!