About the author

John Bunyan (1628–88), religious dissenter and pamphleteer, came under scrutiny during the Restoration when meeting houses were closed and citizens required to attend their parish church. He continued preaching ‘without licence’ and was incarcerated for a decade at Bedfordshire county gaol where he wrote among other works The Pilgrim's Progress.

About the text

The first part of The Pilgrim's Progress went through eleven editions during Bunyan's lifetime and, beginning in 1684, two more with the additional second part. Its popularity (continuously in print since its first publication, and translated into hundreds of languages) resides in the simple allegorical format and universally applicable metaphor of life as a journey (homo viator), a pagan motif developed in its Christian context by Augustine. It also partakes of the dream vision, full of moral matter and internal debate (psychomachia) in the tradition of Boethius and Dante.

The arts of memory

Christian's encounter with Interpreter is full of colloquies, pictures and pantomimes that mark the beginning of his gradual education. Bunyan, like the figure of Memory, records the activities and thoughts of his everyman protogonist. Episodes unfold like pages in an emblem book, where descriptive mottoes, moralising narrative passages, and easily recalled poems give coherence to the puzzling and occasionally arresting figures. The mnemonic itinerary gives rise to lucid visions and biblical loci, a few of which are developed into fully realised episodes. So powerful are some of Bunyan's images that they have been absorbed into the language, for example Wicket Gate, Worldly Wiseman and Vanity Fair.

Textual notes

The pilgrim's progress from this world to that which is to come (London, 1681), C2v–C9r.

The Pilgrim's Progress

CHR. ‘Sir,’ said Christian, ‘I am a man that am come from the City of Destruction, and am going to the Mount Zion; and I was told by the man that stands at the gate at the head of this way, that if I called here you would show me excellent things, such as would be helpful to me on my journey.’