The Pilgrim's Progress

Overview

About three hundred pages across two parts, written by John Bunyan, a tinker turned itinerant Baptist preacher with almost no formal education, largely during two separate periods of imprisonment in Bedford jail for preaching without a license under laws restricting nonconformist worship after the Restoration of Charles II. Part I appeared in 1678 and was an immediate and enormous popular success; Part II followed in 1684. Between its first publication and the early twentieth century, The Pilgrim’s Progress was, alongside the Bible, the most widely read and most widely translated book in the English-speaking world, carried by missionaries, printed in cheap popular editions, and absorbed so thoroughly into English-language culture that its place names and characters, the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, Giant Despair, became proverbial phrases independent of any awareness of their source.

The book takes the form of a dream vision, narrated by a sleeping dreamer who watches the allegorical journey unfold, a medieval literary form Bunyan inherited without ever having studied it formally, and applies it with a directness and concreteness that owes far more to his intimate, lifelong familiarity with the King James Bible than to any acquaintance with earlier allegorical literature. Every place and person on the road to the Celestial City is literally named for what it represents, and this bluntness, sometimes dismissed by more sophisticated literary readers as unsubtle, is exactly what made the book immediately comprehensible to readers with no training in allegory as a formal device.

What happens

Part I: Christian’s journey. A man, living in the City of Destruction and burdened by a great weight of sin on his back that he cannot remove, reads in a book, the Bible, that his city is doomed, and is urged by a figure named Evangelist to flee toward a distant shining light. He abandons his wife and children, who will not come with him, plugging his ears against their cries as he runs, and sets out, now called Christian, on the road to the Celestial City.

The journey passes through a sequence of allegorical trials, each named for exactly what it is. The Slough of Despond, a miry bog of despair, nearly swallows him before he arrives at it; Mr. Worldly Wiseman tempts him toward an easier, false path through Legality and Morality that leads not to salvation but to a mountain that threatens to crush him with its own weight; at the Wicket Gate and later at the house of Interpreter he receives instruction and encouragement; and at the Cross, his burden finally and suddenly falls from his back and rolls away, the moment of his conversion, dramatized with genuine emotional force.

Companions join and fall away: Pliable turns back at the first sign of difficulty, and Christian is joined by Faithful, with whom he passes through Vanity Fair, a permanent, literal marketplace selling every worldly good and vice a soul could want, where the two pilgrims are mocked, tried and imprisoned for refusing to buy what is sold there, and Faithful is martyred, burned at the stake, while Christian escapes and continues on, now joined by Hopeful.

Later trials include Doubting Castle, where Christian and Hopeful are imprisoned and beaten by Giant Despair for straying from the path onto Giant Despair’s own land, escaping only when Christian remembers he has carried, the whole time, a key called Promise that opens every lock in the castle. Nearer the end, they cross the Delectable Mountains, are warned against the Enchanted Ground where sleep is fatal, and finally reach the River of Death, which every pilgrim must cross to enter the Celestial City, Christian nearly drowning in his own remaining fear before reaching the far shore, where he is received with trumpets and rejoicing.

Part II: Christiana’s journey. Written six years later, the second part follows Christian’s abandoned wife Christiana, now repentant of having refused to accompany her husband, and their children, undertaking the same road with a guide, Mr. Greatheart, who protects them through trials considerably less harsh than Christian faced alone. The second part revisits many of the same allegorical locations, the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, now finally destroyed by Greatheart, giving readers a softer, more communal and more explicitly domestic version of the same essential journey, ending, as Part I does, with a crossing of the river into the Celestial City.

How to read it

Read Part I as a complete work in itself; it is the more widely read, more frequently anthologized, and more artistically concentrated of the two parts, and many readers stop there without losing the book’s essential achievement.

Read the allegory literally rather than looking for hidden subtlety. Bunyan names his places and people for exactly what they are, and the pleasure and the power of the book depend on taking that directness seriously rather than treating it as a code requiring decipherment.

Notice how much of the prose’s rhythm and vocabulary comes directly from the King James Bible, which was, for Bunyan, essentially the only book he had read closely enough to absorb as a model for his own writing. The plainness that makes the book accessible to readers with no literary training is the plainness of a mind saturated in scripture rather than in classical or courtly literature.

Read the scene of Christian’s departure from his family with real attention to its discomfort. Bunyan does not soften the cost of Christian’s choice, and the second part’s return to the same family, years later, following the same road, is best read as Bunyan’s own, later reckoning with what the first part’s uncompromising individual salvation narrative left out.

Read Vanity Fair as the book’s sharpest piece of social satire as well as its most vivid allegorical set piece, a marketplace selling honors, pleasures, wives, husbands, titles and every worldly good, in which the pilgrims’ simple refusal to buy anything marks them as dangerous outsiders worth persecuting.

Questions it raises

• Does the allegory’s bluntness, naming every place and person for exactly what it represents, make the book more or less powerful than a more indirect, symbolic treatment of the same spiritual journey would be?
• Is Christian’s abandonment of his wife and children at the outset a necessary, if agonizing, act of faith, or does the book’s own severity here trouble its larger claims about love and family?
• What does Vanity Fair, a permanent marketplace for every worldly good, suggest about how Bunyan understood the relationship between commerce, temptation and ordinary social life?
• Why does Bunyan write a second part that softens and domesticates the first, sending Christiana and the children on essentially the same road with a protector, rather than leaving Christian’s solitary journey to stand alone?
• How does the book’s dream-vision frame, a sleeping narrator watching the whole allegory unfold, change how a reader should take the literal reality of the journey compared to a straightforwardly narrated story?
• What made this specific combination, biblical plainness of language and total allegorical directness, so durably popular across three centuries and so many languages, when more sophisticated religious literature of the same period has been largely forgotten by general readers?