The Pilgrim’s Progress
The Pilgrim’s Progress
by John Bunyan
THE LITERARY WORK
An allegory set in a timeless dreamscape that resembles rural England in the seventeenth century; published in 1678.
SYNOPSIS
A Christian experiences an intense spiritual crisis that impels him to abandon his home and family in the City of Destruction (the world of sin and damnation) to seek the Celestial City (heaven).
Events in History at the Time the Allegory Takes Place
John Bunyan’s life spanned one of the most dramatic periods in English history. He was born in Bedford in 1628, just a year before Charles I dissolved Parliament and began 11 years of “personal rule.” In 1640, when economic necessity finally forced Charles I to recall Parliament, the competing interests of the aristocracy, the growing bourgeoisie, religious dissenters, and the army clashed, and by 1642 civil war had broken out. The execution of Charles I remains the most notorious incident of this period, but profound changes occurred at every level of society. This is the world in which Bunyan came of age and which formed the religious and political convictions that shaped his literary career. When the teenaged Bunyan entered the army in 1644, he must have served under antiroyalist parliamentary forces and was thus exposed to some of the most iconoclastic thought that has ever emerged in English history. Suggestions of the lasting influence of this formative period resonate throughout his writings. After a long, agonizing conversion, he was accepted into the Independent Church, a Protestant congregation, and eventually became a noted lay preacher and author of polemic religious works. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, radical Protestant sects and lay preaching were no longer tolerated; in 1661 Bunyan was arrested for lay preaching and put in jail. It was during his 12-year imprisonment that he began his most popular work, The Pilgrim’s Progress, an allegorical tale of how an individual can successfully travel the path to salvation in a world of spiritual corruption and social injustice.
Events in History at the Time the Allegory Takes Place
The rise of the individual in the Reformation
The events of The Pilgrim’s Progress seem to occur outside of time or place—Bunyan frames the allegorical journey toward heaven of his representative man, Christian, in the context of a dream. Actually, the story is firmly anchored by an early, radical Protestant belief system within the landscape of social and political turmoil of the English civil wars and the subsequent restoration of the monarchy. To understand Bunyan’s viewpoint, one needs to keep in mind the original meaning of the term “Protestant.” It emanated from the Reformation movement, heralded in Wittenberg, Germany, in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses—which condemned the Roman Catholic practice of selling indulgences (remission of punishment for sin)—on the door of the local church. Although writing a century and a half later, Bunyan is still working out how this original “protest” against the state of the late-medieval Catholic Church affects the individual’s understanding of salvation.
Corruption in the Roman Catholic Church is often cited as the reason for the Protestant Reformation, but at the heart of this revolution, which would last centuries, was the relationship of the individual to God. Reformation theologians took the concept of original sin (the idea that all people are born as sinners as a result of the fall of Adam and Eve) to its logical extreme and emphasized that performing good works in this world could not assure a heavenly reward. The Calvinist strain of Protestantism stressed the idea of predestination, that all souls are either elect (destined by God’s inscrutable will to be saved) or reprobate (justly doomed to damnation because of their innate depravity). This meant that, instead of looking to the hierarchical authority of the Church, each person had to seek his or her own personal relationship with God, and, rather than solicit the intercession of saints, every person had to find evidence of the working of Christ in his or her own life.
The Reformation has been seen by some as a key component in the development of an introspective, subjective, “modern” self, and The Pilgrim’s Progress certainly emphasizes such a sense of individuality. Though he meets both allies and enemies along the way and sometimes travels with a companion, Christian’s journey is essentially a solitary one; ultimately he alone will be responsible for its success or failure. By the end it appears that Christian is one of God’s elect, but along the way this fact does not make his path any less precarious. The dangers he faces are real, and some of the greatest pitfalls in his way are highly subjective, internalized conflicts. Christian’s struggle with spiritual numbness, self-doubt, and the fear that he is not “chosen” sounds very much like a seventeenth-century Protestant conversion narrative.
Bunyan’s Christian, like other seventeenth-century Protestants, benefits greatly from the proliferation of English translations of the Bible, such as the Geneva translation (1560) and the authorized King James version (1611); previously, Bibles had been published in Latin. Advances in printing technology made books much more widely accessible in the late seventeenth century. An increase in basic literacy made reading possible for more and more people, and better access to Bibles in English allowed readers to engage in independent application of Scripture to personal experience. It is significant, therefore, that The Pilgrim’s Progress begins with a vision of Christian with a book in his hand. The dream-narrator describes Christian’s reaction, saying that “as he read, he wept and trembled: and not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry; saying, what shall I do?” (Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 8). Here Bunyan is indicating the power of reading in enacting radical change—spiritual and, as it turned out, social and political as well.
The changes brought by the Reformation continued to revolutionize England well into the seventeenth century. Calvinist Protestantism taught that all people had equal opportunity and claim to salvation, and this naturally suggested a leveling of social relations and economics. In relation to the poor, the working classes, and displaced or itinerant populations, the new theology created a liberating “double sense of power—individual self-confidence and strength through unity” (Hill, World Turned Upside Down, p. 154). Actually “Protestantism was not a democratic creed”—from Luther’s Germany to Bunyan’s England the revolution concerned a certain type of “Christian liberty, liberty for the elect” (Hill, World Turned Upside Down, p. 156). But for those who felt God’s calling, it was indeed powerful. Like Bunyan himself (who was trained as a tinker), Christian is a “common” sort of man who nevertheless takes on lords, judges, and clergy. Although often taken as a universal paradigm of spiritual journey, The Pilgrim’s Progress is a product of seventeenth-century spiritual, social, and political concerns.
Congregation vs. parish
Just as the conservative, Presbyterian parliamentary establishment was beginning to suppress more radical groups at the turn of the 1650s, Bunyan was experiencing the first pangs of his three-year spiritual crisis, which culminated in his conversion and his joining of the Independent congregation at Bedford. The freedom with which Bunyan could embrace a congregation with selective membership was itself a sign of remarkable religious change. Bunyan’s was a “gathered” Church—that is, one formed by individuals who had adequately demonstrated an authentic spiritual experience. Such congregations were fundamentally different from those of the parish system, which were automatically determined by a person’s place of residence. Whereas in the earlier part of the century gathered congregations had to form on the remote soil of Holland or New England, by 1650 compulsory attendance at parish churches was abolished and independent congregations, such as Bunyan’s, flourished.
The Palace Beautiful in The Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory of this kind of Church, “constituted by the inward call of the Holy Spirit to a group of believing men and women and not by government edict” and “accountable to God for keeping its life and that of its members pure and in accordance with their understanding of what Scripture required” (White, pp. 52, 54). When Christian is told that he must converse with and satisfy the maiden Discretion before entering the Palace Beautiful, Bunyan’s allegory is reflecting the practices of the gathered Church tradition that defined his own experience. In Bunyan’s vision, fellowship is helpful to the spiritual sojourner but not strictly necessary: the character Faithful goes on alone right past the Palace Beautiful and (through his martyrdom) still reaches salvation before Christian. Nonetheless, Bunyan’s allegory seems to suggest that belonging to a Church is advantageous in this wicked world: the armor that Christian receives at the Palace Beautiful empowers him to fight Apollyon and the monster’s claim to sovereignty over him as a resident of the City of Destruction.
Lay preaching
By 1655 Bunyan had begun to preach, first within his Independent congregation and then publicly in the area of Bedford. Lay preaching is a logical extension of the general trend toward individual conscience, a direct relationship with God and a dismantling of ecclesiastical hierarchies, but not all Protestant groups were entirely comfortable with expanded access to the pulpit. Presbyterians, for example, preferred ordained ministers and an alternative Church hierarchy made up of lay elders.
Bunyan’s position seems to have been somewhere between that of the more conservative Presbyterians and that, for example, of the Quakers, who felt that any individual, even a Women, might speak publicly if the Holy Spirit so moved him or her. Bunyan objected to Quaker practices because, among other things, they valued the power of the spirit more than that of the Bible. In contrast, Bunyan subscribed to the ultimate primacy of the Bible. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, his character the Evangelist portrays a Christian minister assuming what Bunyan deems to be the minister’s proper role in the conversion experience—starting the troubled soul down the road to salvation and providing scripturally sound advice in times of crisis—although the seemingly otherworldly Evangelist cannot easily be identified as a specific social type, such as a university-educated minister. Bunyan and others like him held that what makes a minister or lay preacher an effective agent of God is not his worldly status but his spiritual calling.
Bunyan himself felt that calling and became a “mechanic preacher,” an itinerant speaker who often spoke abroad and particularly to the disenfranchised. Bunyan and others like him presented a fundamental challenge to a stratified class system in which laborers and artisans were expected to keep to their station (again, Bunyan was a mere tinker) and ministers were expected to have a university education (an advantage that was not available to everyone). In his preaching, Bunyan used “plain style,” a straightforward, unornamented rhetoric preferred by the Puritan clergy. He also took part in vigorous theological controversies (first and most notably against the Quakers) and published many polemical writings early in his career. So what made Bunyan and other lay preachers so troubling to the university-trained
BUNYAN RECOUNTS HIS TRIAL
“He [the magistrate] said, that I [Bunyan] was ignorant and did not understand the Scriptures; for how (said he) can you understand them, when you know not the original Greek? etc.
… To [him] I said, that if that was his opinion, that none could understand the Scriptures, but those that had the original Greek, etc., then but a very few of the poorest sort should be saved.…
… He said there was none that heard me, but a company of foolish people.
… I told him that there was the wise as well as the foolish that do hear me; and again, those that are most commonly counted foolish by the world are the wisest before God.…
… He told me, that I made people neglect their calling; and that God had commanded people to work six days, and serve him on the seventh.
… I told him, that it was the duty of people, (both rich and poor) to look out for their souls on them days, as well as for their bodies: and that God would have his people exhort one another daily.…
… Well, said he, to conclude, but will you promise that you will not call the people together any more? And then you may be released, and go home.
… I told him, that I durst say no more than I had said. For I durst not leave off that work which God had called me to.”
(Bunyan, Grace Abounding, p.p. 92–93)
orthodoxy? In a sense, it was simply disagreement over a matter of “calling.” While others felt his calling was to be a tinker, Bunyan insisted it was to spread the Gospel.
The Restoration and Bunyan’s imprisonment
The final years of the 1650s saw an end to the religious toleration that fostered social and political challenges to the economic and political status quo of English society. In 1660 the monarchy was restored (in the person of Charles II, son of the executed king), along with the House of Lords and the hierarchy of the official Church of England. It was the beginning of a period of suppression and persecution of the “Dissenters,” Puritans who dissented from the Church of England and who had pursued their religious beliefs more or less freely for almost two decades. Beginning in 1660 and until 1828, the Dissenters were forbidden from entering the university and Parliament, and were not supposed to gather for worship. Bunyan himself was one of many Dissenters arrested for illegal preaching. As a mechanic preacher he was deemed categorically dangerous because “[f]or the Bedfordshire gentry Bunyan’s preaching, even if it did not directly incite rebellion, fanned the discontent that many felt with the restored regime and church” (Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People, p. 107).
When Bunyan was finally brought to trial, he was not officially charged for illegal preaching but (under an old Elizabethan act) for unlawful meetings. Although such a charge appeared to pertain to civil rather than religious offenses, it was clear that Bunyan was convicted for being a mechanic preacher. Originally sentenced to just three months in jail, Bunyan refused to stop preaching and was thus handed a 12-year sentence. It was a time of great hardship for him and his family but also a period of much literary activity, including the inception of The Pilgrim’s Progress. The book opens with a reference to his imprisonment (explicitly glossed in the marginalia) during these disappointing years: “As I walk’d through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn; And I laid me down in that place to sleep: And as I slept I dreamed a Dream” (The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 8). Just as the dream frames the story of Christian’s journey, the fact of Bunyan’s imprisonment (in the “Denn”) frames the dream itself.
The most dramatic and famous sequence in the book, when Christian and Faithful arrive at Vanity Fair and are subsequently tried, draws on Bunyan’s own experience. Although the two pilgrims appear to do nothing but refrain from buying goods, and offend merely by a public display of piety, the indictment against them is “That they were enemies to, and disturbers of their Trade; that they had made Commotions and Divisions in the Town, and had won a party to their own most dangerous Opinions, in contempt of the Law of their Prince” (The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 76). This civil charge exposes a fear of popular sedition reminiscent of the atmosphere around the time of the Restoration when church / state orthodoxy and social hierarchies sought to reassert themselves. It is also significant that not only the judge but many of the offended parties at the trial are lords. The witness Pickthank testifies that Faithful “hath railed on our noble Prince Beelzebub, “spoke contemptibly” of the local nobility (Lord Carnal Delight, Lord Desire of Vain-glory, Sir Having Greedy, etc.), and “said moreover, that if all men were of his mind, if possible, there is not one of these Noble-men should have any longer a being in this Town” (The Pilgrim’s Progress, pp. 77-78). Here the intensity of the threat (real and perceived) posed by the mechanic preacher and the corresponding reaction by the upper classes is vividly illustrated.
Intolerance
The persecution of Dissenters during the Restoration is only one example in a century peculiarly marked by intolerance. Religious and political affinities were intertwined in seventeenth-century England, and although the age was certainly harder on some groups than on others, everyone found themselves at some point or another the victim of suppression or persecution—Roman Catholics, radical and conservative Dissenters, even orthodox Anglicans. As Charles II’s reign continued, the situation for Dissenters such as Bunyan sometimes got easier. In 1672, for example, Bunyan was released from, prison and even licensed to preach under the Second Declaration of Indulgence. Even the declared Roman Catholic James II at times was tolerant of religious freedoms (if only to make things easier for those of his own faith). It was not until after the Glorious Revolution, however, that broad, institutionalized tolerance was attempted.
Because Christian is persecuted (as was Bunyan himself), it is tempting to read a tolerationist position into The Pilgrim’s Progress. There is, after all, some variety to be found among the successful journeys to the Celestial City. Faithful, for example, gets there without joining in the fellowship of a gathered Church. And yet in most other ways the path is “straight and narrow”; in the end the stories of failure are more numerous than the success stories and usually more vividly drawn. The plea to “be content to follow the Religion of your Countrey, and I will follow the Religion of mine” is not uttered by Christian nor by his pious companions but by Ignorance, who is damned for his lack of proper appreciation of the straightness of the way (The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 101). As mentioned, Bunyan himself exhibited intolerance toward religious convictions that differed from his own; in fact, his first publication, Some Gospel-Truths Opened (1656), targeted the Quakers.
The Allegory in Focus
Plot summary
The Pilgrim’s Progress is framed as a dream. In one sense the dreamer does not interject in the narrative much more than to provide transitions from one event to another (“Then I saw in my dream …,” etc.). In another sense the dream-narrator is a constant, mysterious presence intensifying the reader’s experience of witnessing the story as it unfolds rather than hearing it described in retrospect. The striking opening image thrusts the reader into the story at the very moment of Christian’s spiritual crisis and decision to leave on his journey:
I dreamed, and behold I saw a Man clothed with Raggs standing in a certain place, with his face from his own House, a Book in his hand, and a great burden upon his Back.
(The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 8)
Christian’s reading of “the Book” (the Bible) tells him that he is damned. His family is amazed at his sudden distress yet unable to understand or assist him, but the man simply known as Evangelist (who represents a guiding preacher) is able to instruct Christian on what he must do to save himself. Rebuffing the interference of both his family and neighbors, Christian flees the City of Destruction and runs towards the Wicket-gate—the first landmark on the way to the Celestial City and a sign that his conversion has begun. As soon as he sets out, however, Christian gets stuck in the marshy Slow of Dispond (or slough of depression) and is misled by Mr. Worldly-Wiseman, whose bad advice on a sort of moral shortcut nearly destroys Christian.
With the aid of the Evangelist, Christian arrives safely at the Wicket-gate, but his two near-misses are indicative of the sorts of dangers he will meet throughout the journey, which turns out to be both easier and harder than it appears. Christian’s passage through the Wicket-gate and subsequent visits to the House of the Interpreter and the Palace Beautiful mark a new stage in his journey. In the House of the Interpreter—where he is shown allegorical scenes of salvation and damnation and taught how to decipher them—Christian becomes responsible for correctly “reading” the situations that he encounters along his way. Upon leaving the House of the Interpreter to resume his journey, the difference within Christian is marked by three “shining ones” who bestow the forgiveness of his sins, the change of his “Rags” for “Raiment,” and the receipt of “a Roll with a Seal upon it,” a sort of certificate that is both a sign of his assurance of salvation and a textual source of “refreshment” to read along the way (The Pilgrim’s Progress, pp. 31-32). He is now a better interpreter of allegorical situations and is equipped to deal with such characters as Simple, Sloth, Presumption, Formalist, and Hypocrise—and yet Christian still falls victim to deceptive appearances and his own lapses of spiritual vigilance (such as when he falls asleep and loses his Roll). Even though he has the benefit of fellowship (at the Palace Beautiful) and traveling companions at times (first Faithful and then Hopeful), Christian’s way to the Celestial City is characterized by failures as well as successes. Christian steadily improves as a spiritual “reader,” but later failures will show that his understanding is never without some degree of human imperfection.
In the Valley of Humiliation, Christian confronts Apollyon, a Satanic monster and tempter of mankind who claims sovereignty over him as a subject of the City of Destruction. The dramatic battle that ensues is much more active than the cerebral skirmishes with doubt and presumption in which Christian has engaged thus far, and yet there are psychological aspects to it. He fights Apollyon with the sword and armor he receives upon leaving the Palace Beautiful, but this weaponry must also be understood figuratively as the advantage of Godly fellowship. Only after failing to trick Christian does Apollyon attack him physically, and it is Christian’s good sense that finally defeats his opponent.
The dangers Christian encounters in the Valley of the Shadow of Death are also a mix of the physical and the psychological. When Christian sees the “two Giants, Pope and Pagan” he can pass them “without much danger” because “that Pagan has been dead many a day” and the “Pope” is “by reason of his age … grown so crazy and stiff in his joynts, that he can now do little more then sit in his Caves mouth, grinning at Pilgrims as they go by, and biting his nails, because he cannot come at them” (The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 54).
And yet not all dangers along the way can be overcome with the power of spiritual understanding. At Vanity Fair (a place that effectively transforms familiar provincial festivities into a site of empty frivolities and sin), Christian and his new companion, Faithful, are arrested, beaten, and put on trial for the “Commotions and Divisions in the Town” occasioned by their pious detachment from the corruption of the marketplace. There is very little they can do but embrace martyrdom (The Pilgrim’s Progress, pp. 72-80). Both Christian and Faithful secretly hope they are the one whom the Evangelist has predicted will die “yet have the better of his fellow” in death—in other words, the one who will reach heaven first through glorious martyrdom (The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 72). The Jury (Mr. Blindman, Mr. No-good, Mr. Malice, Mr. Love-lust, Mr. Live-loose, Mr. Heady, Mr. High-mind, Mr. Enmity, Mr. Lyar, Mr. Cruelty, Mr. Hate-light, and Mr. Implacable) delivers a predictably grim verdict under the Judge (Lord Hategood), and Faithful is put to a cruel death. Christian escapes this fate and continues his journey with a new companion, Hopeful, who comes upon his name, it seems, “by the beholding of Christian and Faithful in their words and behavior, in their sufferings at the fair” (The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 80).
Fellowship and conversation play an increasingly prominent role in the story as the work progresses. Not only do individual stories edify and give comfort to fellow pilgrims, but together the travelers can recognize and resist the bad examples, deceptions, and faulty doctrine of those whom they meet along the way. And yet even with spiritual companionship the travelers fall into the hands of the Giant Despair at Doubting-Castle. Here again is a place of mixed psychological and physical danger, where the pilgrims are tortured in mind and body. Fittingly it is Hopeful who comforts Christian when he is beaten down (literally and figuratively) by Despair, but ultimately it is the literate Christian who suddenly remembers the “Key in my bosom, called Promise” (biblical texts that offer salvation) and accomplishes their escape (The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 96).
Christian and Hopeful reach the last stage of the journey and the Shepherds (experienced members of a heavenly fellowship who proffer advice) give them the enigmatic reassurance that the way is “safe for those for whom it is to be safe, but transgressors shall fall therein” (The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 98). By this time, it looks as though the difficulties are over. The two pilgrims avoid the errors of Ignorance and Little-faith. However, Flatterer is disguised as an Angel of Light and ensnares Christian and Hopeful. They are released by “a shining one,” who whips them for their inattention (The Pilgrim’s Progress, pp. 109-110). The two make their way through the Inchanted Ground and come near their final destination. At last they are within sight of the Gate to the City, which lies across a deep river. The river is death, a passage that all must make. Christian, nearly paralyzed with fear and overcome by the waters, manages to cross over only with the aid of Hopeful. Once on the other side the two are welcomed into Heaven in a scene of great rejoicing. As Ignorance, who has been ferried across the river by Vain-hope, is taken away, the narrative closes with the admonition that it is just as possible for an erring soul to go to Hell from the very gates of Heaven as it is from the City of Destruction.
Teaching the reader how to read
Like Christian in the House of the Interpreter, readers of The Pilgrim’s Progress must learn to understand allegory and apply it correctly to their own lives. Some allegories are simply more complicated than others. Like Christian, the reader may easily see why it is necessary to flee the City of Destruction and yet fail at first to understand why one must avoid Mr. Legality and his son Civility who live in the Town of Morality. Included in the allegory are Bunyan’s marginal notes, which help the reader understand the subtle points and strict doctrine of the allegory. Scriptural passages function as a sort of Biblical study guide. In fact, the marginalia and scriptural passages in The Pilgrim’s Progress were so central to the objectives of the book that Bunyan never stopped adding to them.
In some ways The Pilgrim’s Progress is a continuation of the lay preaching that was so important to Bunyan that he went to prison rather than promise to give it up. At an even more fundamental level, the composition of an accessible text that even a minimally literate person can grasp furthers the general commitment of the Reformation to help people find spiritual enlightenment through reading. Bunyan was very successful in creating such an accessible book— The Pilgrim’s Progress was initially popular with the poor and the working classes who had less formal education, and in later years it was considered particularly appropriate for younger readers and eventually came out in many editions for children.
Although a didactic text, The Pilgrim’s Progress by no means offers merely a static, one-way reading process. Christian is often asked to narrate his story—such as when he must give an account of his journey to Discretion before being admitted to the Palace Beautiful. This has elements of a sort of practical catechism in that Christian must provide correct interpretations of events, but it is a highly subjective, extemporaneous performance as well. His fellow travelers, Faithful and Hopeful, also share their stories, and what they report encountering is often quite different from what Christian has experienced. In some congregational churches a successful confession of one’s spiritual development was required for full membership. More generally, however, the ability to tell about one’s spiritual journey created a sense of community and drew in new members, serving as a type of informal, grassroots evangelism. Bunyan creates characters who do not so much dictate what true conversion must look like but rather provide varied examples of what it might look like. In the end Bunyan wants the reader to do more than passively receive his book. In his verse conclusion, he offers this final challenge:
NOW Reader, I have told my Dream to thee;
See if thou canst Interpret it to me;
Or to thy self, or Neighbour: but take heed
Of mis-interpreting …
Put by the Curtain, look within my Vail;
Turn up my Metaphors and do not fail:
There, if thou seekest them, such things to find,
As will be helpful to an honest mind.
(The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 134)
Sources and literary context
The Bible, of course, is a crucial source in The Pilgrim’s Progress; Bunyan uses scriptural language and imagery, and biblical quotations illustrate and are illuminated by every step (and misstep) Christian takes. Many have also noted the autobiographical influence in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Not only do events such as Bunyan’s imprisonment figure into the plot—the trial of Faithful, for example, can be read as a sort of allegorical parody of Bunyan’s own trial—but some also read Christian’s allegorical journey according to the author’s own conversion story as presented in his autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. In fact, Bunyan’s own spiritual development, his theological beliefs, and literary style are all intertwined. His first wife brought books into the marriage as part of a material and spiritual dowry—Arthur Dent’s The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heaven and Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety. Both of these books have had a profound influence on Bunyan’s theology, as has Martin Luther’s Commentary on Galatians, a work Bunyan was reputed to hold in the highest esteem.
THE SEQUEL TO THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS
The Pilgrim’s Progress, the Second Part was published in 1684 and is evidence of the popularity of the original. Bunyan was not merely capitalizing on his former success, however. In part Bunyan’s sequel was intended to thwart the proliferation of “continuations” of the story by other people. Ironically, while counterfeited and pirated editions cut Bunyan out of profits and recognition, they offered further proof of the popular success of The Pilgrim’s Progress.
The reception of the original is mirrored in the plot of the Second Part itself as the protagonist’s wife, Christiana, their children, and various companions follow Christian’s trail—complete with markers and monuments to the earlier journey—towards the Celestial City. The landscape, once the site of scenes of intense isolation, is now populated by many travelers who, like the reader, know the story of Christian’s journey. Bunyan’s sequel shows what a spiritual journey would be like if, instead of an agonized solitary experience, it was a collective popular phenomenon, one that welcomed a wider variety of travelers.
Dent’s The Plaine Mans Pathway to Heaven contains an extended dialog between Theologus (“a Divine”), Philagathus (“an honest man”; literally “love-good”), Asunetus (“an ignorant man”), and Antilegon (“a caviller,” or frivolous hairsplitter; literally “against the word”). The dialog provided Bunyan not only with a precise account of the “straight and narrow” way to heaven but also with an important literary model. Puritan Protestants were against theater in all forms, and Dent’s justification of dialog was crucial for Bunyan; in his “Apology,” which introduces The Pilgrim’s Progress, he explicitly reminds the potentially offended reader “that men (as high as Trees) will write/Dialogue-wise; yet no Man doth them slight/For writing so” (The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 5). Other writers’ examples provided literary models as well as justification. John Foxe’s 1563 Acts and Monuments of these latter and perilous days (popularly known as the Book of Martyrs), for example, which Bunyan bought and read while in jail, provided copious examples of Protestant martyrdom presented in vivid, even lurid detail. It also seems that Bunyan must have known Richard Bernard’s The Isle of Man: or, The Legall Proceeding in Man-shire against Sinne, an extended, incredibly detailed allegory in which spiritual malefactors are sought out, arrested, tried, and convicted. Like Bunyan, Bernard provides marginal glosses to render the allegorical characters and their actions absolutely clear.
Unlike Bernard’s allegory, Bunyan’s does not confine itself to criminal justice. Instead, the defining metaphor is the journey as spiritual development—a literary commonplace by Bunyan’s time and, ironically, equally suited to the conversion narrative and the romance (as in a tale of epic adventure). In the episode in which Christian battles Apollyon, Bunyan displays his familiarity with the popular romance tradition in which brave heroes fight dragons and other monsters in exciting combat. The influence of other popular genres, such as folktales and ballads, can also be seen throughout the story, especially in Bunyan’s predilection for songs, which punctuate major episodes in the allegory.
The decision to publish
The reasons leading to Bunyan’s final decision to publish The Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678 are still not entirely clear, although relaxation of censorship was certainly a factor. Nevertheless, Bunyan still would have had to be somewhat circumspect about how he presented his more controversial ideas. Even after the Restoration had firmly taken hold, Bunyan had to keep in mind “the nervous rulers of England, who equated obstinate refusal to conform to the state church with sedition and rebellion. Jailbirds like Bunyan had to be especially careful. So we should not expect outspoken political comment in his writings; nor were politics his main concern” (Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People, p. 119). For Bunyan, patience was a necessary way to deal with Restoration censorship, but allegory was a more creative way around the same problem. Bunyan, as noted, provided his own marginal glosses to explain crucial points of the allegory, adding to his explanations in successive editions. For the modern reader further notes are required to open up the rich complexities of the apparently straightforward correspondences.
Impact
The Pilgrim’s Progress has made a lasting impression on subsequent writers, especially novelists. To mention just a handful of examples in the nineteenth century, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Mark Twain all create characters who read and are affected by The Pilgrim’s Progress. In Little Women, for instance, Alcott does not merely make her four heroines avid readers of Bunyan; they re-enact Christian’s journey and Alcott herself at points shapes her narrative to the contours of Bunyan’s book, naming chapters after famous episodes. Bunyan’s book is in fact a proto-novel, one of the earliest models for popular prose fiction that emerged just before the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century. This is an ironic victory for Bunyan, who certainly would be surprised to discover his importance in the development of a secular genre historically considered to be immoral. As Christopher Hill has observed, “Just as Oliver Cromwell aimed to bring about the kingdom of God on earth and founded the British Empire, so Bunyan wanted the millennium and got the novel” (Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People, p. 368).
Reception
When it appeared in 1672, The Pilgrim’s Progress was “an immediate and unprecedented bestseller,” going through three editions in its first year and 13 editions by the time Bunyan died in 1688 (Keeble, p. 245). This is not to say that the immediate response to Bunyan’s work was uncritical. Since the work was to a great extent polemical, reactions were based on content more than on literary considerations, and in addition to admirers (and even imitators) there were plenty of religious and political detractors. The popularity of the book remained high among the poor, middle, and working classes (and, as it turned out, in America), and yet “[a]mong the literati of the early eighteenth century Bunyan’s popularity was taken not as proof of his excellence but as confirmation of his vulgarity, and so of his inconsequentiality” (Keeble, p. 246). This mixed response has endured for over three centuries.
Although writers such as Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Lawrence Sterne came to appreciate Bunyan’s literary merits despite prevailing dismissive attitudes, it was not until the nineteenth century that critical and popular estimations of The Pilgrim’s Progress came closer together. On the one hand, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, and other Romantic writers praised Bunyan as “the embodiment of the ‘heav’n-sent’ or ‘natural’ genius” (although such praise “tended to ignore or denigrate his conscious artistry”) (Forrest and Greaves, p. xi). On the other hand, it also appears that “Bunyan’s reputation ascended the social scale only as the middling sort and evangelicism gained respectability in the nineteenth century” (Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People, p. 366). In any case, Bunyan’s almost uniformly favorable—if rather uncritical—reputation in the 1800s flagged towards the end of the century. The twentieth century saw increased interest in the literary complexities of The Pilgrim’s Progress, and renewed critical attention has provided an abundance of nuanced readings of the deceptively simple allegory.
—Meredith Neuman
For More Information
Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1987.
—— The Pilgrim’s Progress. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
——. The Pilgrim’s Progress from this world to that which is to come. Ed. J.B. Wharley and R. Shar-rock. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.
Evans, Vivienne, and Lewis Evans. John Bunyan: His Life and Times. Dunstable, Bedfordshire: The Book Castle, 1988.
Forrest, James F., and Richard Lee Greaves. John Bunyan: a Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.
Hill, Christopher. A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church 1628-1688. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
——. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1975.
Keeble, N. H. “’Of him thousands daily Sing and talk’: Bunyan and his Reputation.” In John Bunyan Coventicle and Parnassus Tercentenary Essays. Ed. N. H. Keeble. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
Pooley, Roger. “Grace Abounding and the New Sense of Self.” In John Bunyan and His England, 1628-88. Ed. Anne Laurence, W. R. Owens, and Stuart Sim. London: Hambledon, 1990.
White, Barrie. “John Bunyan and the Context of Persecution, 1660-1668.” In John Bunyan and His England, 1628-88. Ed. Anne Laurence, W. R. Owens, and Stuart Sim. London: Hambledon, 1990.