The Pilgrim's Progress

The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come by John Bunyan (published 1678) is an allegorical novel. Bunyan wrote this book while imprisoned in 1675 for violations of the Conventicle Act which punished people for conducting unauthorised religious services outside of the Church of England. An expanded edition, with additions written after Bunyan was freed, appeared in 1679. The Second Part appeared in 1684. This work is one of the greatest classics of literature, widely translated into more than 100 languages other than its original English text. The text consists of 108,260 words and, within each of its two parts, is not further divided, e.g. into chapters, but reads as a continuous narrative.

The Pilgrim's Progress in Literature

The allegory of this book has antecedents in a large number of Christian devotional works that speak of the soul's path to Heaven, from the Lyke-Wake Dirge forwards. Bunyan's allegory stands out above his predecessors because of his simple and effective, if somewhat naïve, prose style, steeped in Biblical texts and cadences. He confesses his own naïveté in the verse prologue to the book:

Related Topics:
Christian - Heaven - Lyke-Wake Dirge - Biblical

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:. . . I did not thinkTo shew to all the World my Pen and InkIn such a mode; I only thought to makeI knew not what: nor did I undertakeThereby to please my Neighbour; no not I;I did it mine own self to gratifie.

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Its explicitly Protestant theology also made it much more popular than its predecessors. Finally, Bunyan's gifts and plain style breathe life into the abstractions of the anthropomorphized temptations and abstractions Christian encounters and converses with on his course to Heaven. Samuel Johnson said that "this is the great merit of the book, that the most cultivated man cannot find anything to praise more highly, and the child knows nothing more amusing." Three years after its publication, it was reprinted in colonial America, and was widely read in the Puritan colonies.

Related Topics:
Protestant - Anthropomorphized - Samuel Johnson - Colonial America - Puritan

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The book was the basis of an opera by Ralph Vaughan Williams, premiered in 1951; see The Pilgrim's Progress (opera).

Related Topics:
Opera - Ralph Vaughan Williams - The Pilgrim's Progress (opera)

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E. E. Cummings also makes numerous referrals to it in his prose work, The Enormous Room.

Related Topics:
E. E. Cummings - The Enormous Room

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John Buchan was an admirer of Bunyan and Pilgrim's Progress features significantly in his third Richard Hannay novel, Mr Standfast which also takes its title from one of Bunyan's characters.

Related Topics:
John Buchan - Richard Hannay - Mr Standfast

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