Unit 5 John Bunyan (1628—1688)

Life

John Bunyan was an English writer and Baptist preacher best remembered as the author of the Christian allegory The Pilgrim's Progress. In addition to The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan wrote nearly sixty titles, many of them expanded sermons.

Bunyan came from the village of Elstow, near Bedford. He had some schooling and at the age of sixteen joined the Parliamentary army during the first stage of the English Civil War. After three years in the army he returned to Elstow and took up the trade of tinker, which he had learned from his father. He became interested in religion after his marriage, attending first the parish church and then joining the Bedford Meeting, a nonconformist group in Bedford, and becoming a preacher. After the restoration of the monarch, when the freedom of nonconformists was curtailed, Bunyan was arrested and spent the next twelve years in jail as he refused to undertake to give up preaching.During this time he wrote a spiritual autobiography,Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners,and began work on his most famous book, The Pilgrim's Progress,which was not published until some years after his release.

Bunyan's later years, in spite of another shorter term of imprisonment, were spent in relative comfort as a popular author and preacher, and pastor of the Bedford Meeting. He died aged 59 after fallingill on a journey to London andis buriedin Bunhill Fields.The Pilgrim's Progress became one of the most published books in the English language; 1,300 editions having been printed by 1938, 250 years after the author's death.

He is remembered in the Church of England with a Lesser Festival on 30 August, and on the liturgical calendar of the United States Episcopal Church on 29 August. Some other churches of the Anglican Communion, such as the Anglican Church of Australia, honour him on the day of his death (31 August).

The Pilgrim's Progress

The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come; Delivered under the Similitude of a Dreamis a 1678 Christian allegory written by John Bunyan.Itis regarded as one of the most significant works of religious English literature, has been translated into more than 200 languages, and has never been out of print.

Bunyan began his work while in the Bedfordshire county prison for violations of the Conventicle Act, which prohibited the holding of religious services outside the auspices of the established Church of England. Early Bunyan scholars such as John Brown believed The Pilgrim's Progress was begunin Bunyan's second,shorterimprisonment for six monthsin 1675, but more recent scholars such as Roger Sharrock believe that it was begun during Bunyan'sinitial, more lengthy imprisonment from 1660 to 1672 right after he had written his spiritual autobiography,Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.

The English text comprises 108,260 words and is divided into two parts, each reading as a continuous narrative with no chapter divisions. The first part was completed in 1677 and enteredinto the Stationers' Register on 22 December 1677. It was licensed and entered in the“Term Catalogue”on 18 February 1678, which is looked upon as the date of first publication. After the first edition of the first part in 1678, an expanded edition, with additions written after Bunyan was freed, appeared in 1679. The Second Part appeared in 1684. There were eleven editions of the first part in John Bunyan's lifetime, published in successive years from 1678 to 1685 and in 1688, and there were two editions of the second part, published in 1684 and 1686.