John Bunyan

John Bunyan was born on November 28, 1628, in the village of Elstow, about a mile south of Bedford in the English Midlands. His father, Thomas Bunyan, worked as a brazier or tinker, mending pots and kettles, and the family held a small cottage and strip of land but little else ^[1]. John received a basic education, probably at a local school, where he learned to read and write before being put to his father's trade. He later described his schooling as slight and claimed he had nearly lost even that learning before his conversion ^[2].

The year 1644 brought a series of blows. His mother died in June, his sister Margaret died the following month, and within weeks his father remarried. That same autumn, at fifteen, Bunyan was mustered into the Parliamentary army during the English Civil War and served in the garrison at Newport Pagnell until 1647 ^[1]. He saw little recorded combat, but he later told of a fellow soldier who took his place at a siege and was shot dead, an escape he came to read as providential ^[2].

After demobilization he returned to Elstow and took up the tinker's trade, traveling the lanes of Bedfordshire with his anvil and tools. Around 1649 he married his first wife, whose name is not recorded with certainty. She brought as her only dowry two devotional books, Arthur Dent's The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven and Lewis Bayly's The Practice of Piety, which the couple read together and which began to unsettle the young tradesman's conscience ^[3].

Bunyan's path to faith was long and tormented, and he documented it with unusual candor in his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, published in 1666 ^[2]. As a young man he was fond of bell ringing, dancing on the village green, and Sunday sports, pastimes that the stricter Puritans of the day condemned. A sermon against Sabbath breaking struck him hard, and he recalled a moment during a game of cat on Elstow green when a voice seemed to ask whether he would leave his sins and go to heaven or keep them and go to hell ^[2].

The decisive encounter came in Bedford, where he overheard a group of poor women sitting in a doorway talking about the new birth and the work of God in their souls. Their talk, he wrote, was of things he knew nothing about, and it drew him into the circle of a small independent congregation led by John Gifford, a former Royalist officer turned pastor ^[3]. For several years Bunyan swung between assurance and despair, at one point convinced he had committed the unforgivable sin of selling Christ. Scriptural phrases would strike him like physical blows, some comforting, some crushing.

By about 1655 the crisis had eased. Bunyan joined Gifford's congregation, moved his family from Elstow into Bedford, and was soon asked to speak at private gatherings. His gifts were obvious. Within a few years the tinker was preaching to crowds across Bedfordshire and the neighboring counties, and in 1656 he published his first book, Some Gospel Truths Opened, a polemic against the Quakers that drew a printed reply from the Quaker leader Edward Burrough ^[1].

The restoration of Charles II in 1660 ended the era of religious freedom that dissenters had enjoyed under Cromwell. Old Elizabethan statutes against unauthorized worship were revived, and in November 1660 Bunyan was arrested at Lower Samsell, near Harlington, as he prepared to preach to a small gathering ^[4]. Offered release if he would promise to stop preaching, he refused, telling the magistrates that if freed today he would preach again tomorrow. He was committed to the county jail in Bedford, and the following January he was formally indicted for holding unlawful assemblies and not attending his parish church ^[4].

His imprisonment lasted, with brief intervals of liberty, for twelve years, from 1660 to 1672. Conditions in the Bedford jail were harsh but not uniformly cruel; sympathetic jailers sometimes allowed him out to visit his family or even to preach. To support his wife and children he made and sold long tagged laces, and he kept two books with him, the Bible and Foxe's Book of Martyrs ^[3]. The hardship fell heavily on his household. His first wife had died in 1658, leaving four young children, one of them his blind daughter Mary, whose plight caused him particular anguish. His second wife, Elizabeth, whom he had married in 1659, pleaded for his release before the assize judges with a boldness that impressed even hostile observers, though her appeals failed ^[4].

Prison made Bunyan a writer. During these years he produced some of his most enduring work, including Grace Abounding in 1666 and, most scholars believe, the first part of The Pilgrim's Progress, begun during this long confinement or during a shorter second imprisonment in 1676 and 1677 ^[5]. In 1672 Charles II issued the Declaration of Indulgence, suspending penal laws against nonconformists, and Bunyan was released under its terms. The Bedford congregation had already chosen him as its pastor in January of that year, and he received a license to preach as a Congregationalist ^[1].

The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come appeared in February 1678, printed in London by Nathaniel Ponder ^[5]. The book recounts a dream in which a man named Christian flees the City of Destruction with a burden on his back and journeys toward the Celestial City, passing through the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and Doubting Castle, home of Giant Despair. Its allegorical machinery was traditional, but its language was not: Bunyan wrote in the plain, muscular English of the common people, salted with proverbs and sharp dialogue, and his characters, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Faithful, Hopeful, Talkative, felt like neighbors rather than abstractions ^[6].

The success was immediate and lasting. The book went through numerous editions in Bunyan's lifetime, and a second part, following Christian's wife Christiana and her children on the same journey, appeared in 1684 ^[5]. Over the following centuries The Pilgrim's Progress was translated into well over a hundred languages and became, alongside the Bible, a fixture of Protestant households in Britain, America, and mission fields worldwide. Among the most striking John Bunyan facts is that this global classic came from a man with no university education and almost no library beyond Scripture ^[6].

Bunyan's other major achievements include The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), a dialogue tracing the career of an unrepentant sinner that some critics treat as an early step toward the English novel, and The Holy War (1682), an elaborate allegory of the siege of the town of Mansoul by Diabolus and its rescue by Emanuel ^[6]. In all, he published around sixty titles, ranging from doctrinal treatises and sermons to A Book for Boys and Girls (1686), a collection of verse emblems for children ^[1].

Bunyan married twice. His first wife, wed around 1649, bore four children: Mary, born blind in 1650, followed by Elizabeth, John, and Thomas. Her death in 1658 left him a widower with young children just as his preaching career was gathering pace ^[1]. In 1659 he married Elizabeth, a woman considerably younger than himself, who raised his children through the prison years and bore two more, Sarah and Joseph. Her spirited defense of her husband before Judge Matthew Hale and the other assize judges in 1661 is one of the best documented episodes of his life, preserved in the account appended to his prison writings ^[4].

Contemporaries described Bunyan as tall and strongly built, with reddish hair, a ruddy complexion, and a mustache, plainly dressed and grave in manner but capable of dry humor ^[3]. He remained a working pastor rather than a literary figure in the London sense, living modestly in Bedford in a cottage on St Cuthbert's Street. His will, and the inventory taken after his death, showed an estate of modest value, a reminder that his enormous readership brought him little wealth in an age without meaningful author royalties ^[1].

His fame as a preacher grew steadily after 1672. He became informally known as the bishop of Bedford for his oversight of dissenting congregations across the region, and on visits to London he drew large crowds; the congregationalist minister George Cokayn and others recorded that thousands might gather to hear him at a morning lecture ^[3].

The political climate for dissenters remained unstable through Bunyan's final decade. The Declaration of Indulgence was withdrawn in 1673, and he was briefly imprisoned again for about six months in 1676 and 1677, released partly through the intervention of John Owen, the eminent Independent theologian who admired his preaching ^[5]. Under James II, whose policy of toleration in the 1680s served Catholic ends, Bunyan was courted with offers of local office; he declined, wary of royal intentions, though he took advantage of the loosened restrictions to preach openly ^[1].

He continued writing at a remarkable pace, publishing ten or more works in his last few years, among them The Jerusalem Sinner Saved and Solomon's Temple Spiritualized. In August 1688 he rode from Bedford to Reading to reconcile a quarrel between a father and son, then continued to London through heavy rain. He fell ill with a fever at the house of his friend John Strudwick, a grocer on Snow Hill, preached his final sermon on August 19, and died on August 31, 1688, at the age of fifty nine ^[1].

Bunyan was buried in Bunhill Fields, the dissenters' burial ground in London where John Owen already lay and where Daniel Defoe, Isaac Watts, and William Blake would later be interred. His tomb, restored in the nineteenth century with a recumbent effigy, remains a site of visits by readers of The Pilgrim's Progress from around the world ^[7].

For two centuries after his death, The Pilgrim's Progress held a place in English speaking culture matched by few books. It traveled with emigrants to North America, was issued in cheap chapbook editions for the poor, and was often the second book, after the Bible, that missionary societies translated into new languages ^[6]. Writers absorbed it early and deeply. Louisa May Alcott structured Little Women around Christian's journey, Mark Twain and Charlotte Brontë alluded to it repeatedly, and William Thackeray took the title Vanity Fair straight from Bunyan's market town of worldly temptation ^[6].

Any serious John Bunyan biography must also reckon with his standing among historians of religion and literature. Scholars such as Christopher Hill placed him within the radical religious culture of the English Revolution, reading his career as evidence of how far ordinary tradesmen shaped seventeenth century thought ^[8]. Literary critics credit Grace Abounding as a landmark of English autobiography and Mr. Badman as a precursor of the realist novel. The Oxford University Press critical edition of his complete works, along with a steady stream of academic studies, keeps his texts under active examination ^[5].

His memory is kept concretely as well. The Bunyan Meeting church in Bedford, successor to his own congregation, houses a museum devoted to his life, and its bronze doors, given in 1876, depict scenes from The Pilgrim's Progress ^[7]. A statue of Bunyan by Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm has stood on St Peter's Green in Bedford since 1874. The Church of England commemorates him in its calendar on August 30. Among John Bunyan achievements, the most durable is the simplest: he proved that plain English, honestly used, could carry a story around the world ^[7].