[1] The story was translated into French by Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès as part of his collection of German ghost-stories Fantasmagoriana (1812), which inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and John William Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1816).

A wealthy merchant named Melchior dies suddenly and his son Franz (called François in Eyriès' translation, and Francis in Utterson's) inherits his father's wealth.

[5] Within this, "The Spectre-Barber" belongs to the subgenre of Kunstmärchen ("art fairy-tales") which typically centres around a moral allegory, with any horrific elements only secondary to fulfilling that.

[6] The tale was inspired by a story told to him about a garden in Bremen's New Town by his niece Caroline Amalie Gildemeister (née Kotzebue), with whom he corresponded frequently.

She gave this story the title "The Spectre-Barber", but abridged it "as it contained much matter relative to the loves of the hero and heroine, which in a compilation of this kind appeared rather misplaced".

[12] J. T. Hanstein's Select Popular Tales from the German of Musaeus (1845) included the story as "Mute Love", condensed and translated for a child audience.

[2] Maximiliaan van Woudenberg examines what influence "L'Amour Muet" had on Frankenstein, and points out the "bedside apparition" motif occurs here as well as in several other of the Fantasmagoriana stories.

The authors attempted to get the same reaction of fear from readers, but shunned the tired motifs of lineage, family loyalty and inheritance, and instead replaced them with a highly charged and unsettling sexual subtext.

"[18] "The Spectre-Barber" is also traced as the source of the "three times recurring dream" motif in Washington Irving's "Wolfert Webber" (from Tales of a Traveller, 1824) according to Walter Reichart.

[22] David Blamires describes "The Spectre-Barber" as managing to "combine a sentimental love-story with the hero's hair-raising encounter with a ghost in a haunted castle, followed by a version of the dream of hidden treasure", claiming that these themes are "of dubious interest to children".