The Ghost-Seer

Furthermore, he talks of his disinterest in deceiving the public as "at the time these pages will tread into the world, I will not be and will neither win nor lose by the account given."

Structurally and stylistically it is not a single story, but tells of a Jesuit secret society trying to convert a Protestant German prince to Catholicism and bring him to the throne back home in order to bolster its own power base.

The work's passages on religious and historical philosophy show Schiller's Enlightenment ideals, with his critique of religion and society to the fore, though a deeper exploration of Immanuel Kant was to follow later.

Due to the novel's slow formation and the author's antipathy to it, it was not planned from start to finish and its style and structure is not uniform throughout, ranging from rhetorical prose, to theatrical prose, to dialogues reminiscent of Don Carlos, to the popular elements of Gothic fiction.

The readership was attracted by its elements typical of the Gothic novel, such as necromancy, spiritualism and conspiracies.