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.