The Pilgrim's Progress (1890)/John Bunyan
JOHN BUNYAN
JOHN BUNYAN
John Bunyan was born in Elstow, Bedfordshire, England, in 1628. Bunyan’s father was a tinker, or mender of pots and kettles. Bunyan himself, was brought up to the same trade. He says, “My descent was of a low and inconsiderable generation, my father’s house being of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families of the land.”
Bunyan learned reading and writing “according,” he says, “to the rate of other poor men’s children.” That little he soon lost “almost utterly.”
When he reached the age of sixteen he appears to have served in one of the armies of the Civil War then raging in England between King Charles I. and the forces raised by Parliament; but it is impossible to say with certainty whether he fought for or against the crown. At the close of the war Bunyan went back to Elstow and resumed his tinker's trade.
He married when about twenty, and he tells us that he and his wife were “as poor as poor might be, without so much household stuff as a dish or spoon between them.”
In 1655 Bunyan moved to Bedford, a little more than a mile from Elstow. He had been converted, and now began to speak in public on matters of religion. Crowds came to hear the once blaspheming tinker who had turned preacher. But though the “common people heard him gladly,” yet the country parsons and doctors of divinity were exceedingly wroth with this presumptuous tinker who “strove to mend souls as well as kettles and pans.”
On the restoration of Charles II. severe acts were passed against those who refused to attend the services of the Church of England. Bunyan, as an itinerant preacher of doctrines not fully in accord with that church, was especially obnoxious to those who upheld the law. As he refused to stop preaching, he was finally arrested and convicted of having “devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming to church.” He was sentenced to the county jail, and there, with the exception of a short period, he remained a prisoner for twelve years (1660–1672). This jail or the town jail—for he seems to have been imprisoned in both—was the “den” of which he speaks in the opening lines of “Pilgrim’s Progress;” and if it was as filthy and as miserably kept as most prisons were at that time in England, then the word “den” exactly describes it.
But in his marvellous dream of “A Pilgrimage from this World to the Next” (published in 1678), Bunyan forgot his squalid surroundings. Like Milton, in his blindness, loneliness, and poverty, he looked within and found that
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell.”
Bunyan’s chief writings besides “The Pilgrim’s Progress” were “The Life and Death of Mr. Badman,” and “The Holy War;” though he published in all about forty other books great and small, and after his death, in 1688, some ten or twelve more were issued bearing his name.
Lord Macaulay says of Bunyan, “Though there were many clever men during the latter part of the seventeenth century, there were only two great creative minds. One of those minds produced the ‘Paradise Lost,’ the other, the ‘Pilgrim's Progress.’”
But aside from its literary merit the “Pilgrim’s Progress” is interesting for the glimpses it gives of the history of the times. “Vanity Fair” is said to have been suggested by the great fair at Sturbridge, near Cambridge, England, as Bunyan saw it, though of course only the dark side of it appears in the allegory.
Again, as Macaulay remarks, there can be no reasonable doubt that the proceedings against Faithful at the fair are intended to satirize “the shameless partiality and ferocious insolence” of the judges in the state trials conducted under Charles II.
“In fact,” says the historian, “the imaginary trial of Faithful before a jury of personified vices was just and merciful when compared with the real trial of Lady Alice Lisle before that tribunal where all the vices sat in the person of Jeffries.”
We cannot close this sketch better than by quoting the last lines of Bunyan's quaint “Apology for his Book”:—
"Would’st read thyself, and read thou know’st not what,
Oh then come hither,
And lay my book, thy head, and heart together.”