raising of ghosts or devils
During the summer of 1816, M. G. Lewis, famous in the 1790s as a
Gothic dramatist and novelist, arrived in Geneva from travels in Germany to visit
Byron. He brought with him a copy of
the first part of Goethe's Faust, which opens with perhaps
the most famous instance of raising the devil in modern literature.
Undoubtedly, Mary Shelley had the alchemist Johannes Faust in mind in
recording the obsessions of Victor Frankenstein. She probably also had
heard from Percy Bysshe Shelley of
his own youthful fantasies toward this end. One example dates from his
adolescent years at Eton College:
One day Mr. Bethell, suspecting from strange noises overhead that his
pupil was engaged in nefarious scientific pursuits, suddenly appeared in
Shelley's rooms; to his consternation he found the culprit apparently half
enveloped in a blue flame. "What on earth are you doing, Shelley?"
"Please sir," came the answer in the quietest tone, "I am raising the
devil."
-- Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London:
Kegan, Paul, Trench & Co, 1886), I, 30.
The poet is at once more circumspect and self-dramatizing in the account
of his brushes with the supernatural in the "Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty," stanza 5, written
contemporaneously with Frankenstein.
