 Poe may have found writing the story therapeutic; in it, he destroys "John Allan", though he is also destroyed in return.In focusing on the final fire scene, Poe may have been recalling the fatal Richmond Theatre fire of December 1811 which occurred three weeks after his mother, the actress Eliza Poe, had died.The German nature of "Metzengerstein" and other stories in the collection "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque" was mentioned in a review by Joseph C. Neal in the "Pennsylvanian" on December 6, 1839