Thomas Peckett Prest

Thomas Peckett Prest (1810–1859) was an English hack writer, musician and journalist, one of the most productive authors of the penny dreadfuls published by Edward Lloyd in the 1830s and 1840s. He wrote plagiarisms of Dickens under names such as Bos, including The Penny Pickwick and Oliver Twiss, and dozens of serial romances of crime and terror. He is usually credited with The String of Pearls (1846–47), the story that introduced Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, and his name has long been attached to Varney the Vampyre (1845–47), though modern scholars assign both works more probably to his colleague James Malcolm Rymer.