OOC POST: Profile
Character’s Name: Mrs. Nellie Lovett
Character’s Fandom: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Character’s Personality: Mrs. Lovett is seemingly quite a down-to-earth and practical woman. Despite not showing any particularly academic qualities, she is very clever and resourceful. This is probably best seen when she suggests to mince the bodies of her partner’s clients into pies, getting rid of the corpses of those who enter Mr. Todd’s Barber Shop and also breathing new life into her failing bakery. She is also, quite obviously, quite hard-working and very devoted.
Even though she does work very hard and is so down-to-earth, she also shows a bit of a willful, wishful attitude. She wants nothing more than to be Sweeney Todd’s love interest, and the fact that he shows next to no interest or even care for her never deters her from this. Usually quite happy, her ideal place to live would be beside the sea and out of dingy London, something she quite enthusiastically sings about to a less-than-enthused Mr. Todd.
She has also been seen as a very kind woman. This is quite obvious in the way she treats Mr. Todd, even though he never seems to have much care for her. A motherly nature also seems to surface in her when she adopts the orphan Toby - she is seen singing to him and giving him food and drink (even if they are human pies and gin).
Of course, she is not without a vindictive, remorseless streak. Despite initial cautions, she shows absolutely no remorse for the people who are a part of her and Mr. Todd’s business partnership, and quite clearly shows no ethical qualms about mincing corpses up and baking them in pies to feed to people. Indeed, as shown, she seems to think it is very practical and therefore a good thing. So remorseless is she when it comes to her and Mr. Todd, she even locks her ‘son’ in the basement with all the corpses from the barber shop and tells Sweeney that he needs to kill him, despite showing tenderness to the boy beforehand.
She’s also extremely envious of the woman who Sweeney was in love with. Rather than tell him that his wife was still alive, Mrs. Lovett let him believe that she was dead in the hopes of being able to replace her in his life. It was this envious streak which lead to her death, for Mr. Todd wasn’t exactly forgiving when he found out.
Character’s History:
There isn’t much in canon that describes Mrs. Lovett’s past. Certainly she was married, and her husband died of gout, leaving her the bakery and small apartments that went with it. Assumedly she was a baker even before his death.
She was definitely Mr. Todd’s neighbour, or at least knew him and his wife, when he was still known as Benjamin Barker. It’s more than hinted that she was attracted to him at that time already, and that she was envious of his wife, Lucy, but not that she disliked her.
Mrs. Lovett kept in business even after Mr. Todd was deported (though, admittedly, barely - she made the worst pies in London) and seemed to take care of his wife and baby daughter. She also appears to have taken care of Lucy after the judge raped her, but only for a short while, and completely put her out of her life when the woman tried to commit suicide, though she knew that she was still alive.
If she was caring for Benjamin and Lucy’s daughter Johanna at the time, she had no qualms about giving the baby to the judge.
Fifteen years after his deportation, Benjamin returned with the assumed name of Sweeney Todd and made straight for Mrs. Lovett’s shop. Her business was all but dead, but she recognized him soon enough and let him up into his old rooms, even giving him back his beloved razors, which she had been keeping despite her need of the money they would have given her. From there, she cautioned him against rushing too blindly into his revenge, but proved herself to be the perfect business partner for him after he started. It was her idea to bake his victims into pies and sell them, and also to keep on the apprentice of the first one to help them about the place.
It was sometime after business was booming that the boy, Toby, told her about his suspicions on Mr. Todd. Rather than have Sweeney found out, Mrs. Lovett locked him in the furnace room, where the pies were baked and made, and went to tell Mr. Todd that he needed to kill him. Toby, however, found a toe in one of the pies he was eating, and at almost the same time saw a body crashing down from Mr. Todd’s rooms onto the basement floor. He escaped.
Mrs. Lovett took Mr. Todd to find him after he killed the Judge who deported him and raped his wife, but Sweeney looked more closely at the beggar woman who he had killed, and recognizing her as his wife, ultimately killed Mrs. Lovett by throwing her into the furnace.