John Bunyan: Pilgrim’s Progress

Impact

It is often said that, after the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress is the most printed, published, and translated book in the world. (It appeared in ninety different editions in the first hundred years after its publication and has been translated into more than two hundred languages.) Certainly it was the top best-seller in premodern England and enjoyed a similar popularity in colonial America. For generations Bunyan’s allegory was the most popular religious text in the English-speaking world.

Although Bunyan’s literary reputation has somewhat diminished in modern times, it was not only his religious views that were influential. Readers who passed over the spiritual message of Pilgrim’s Progress were often affected by Bunyan’s powerful and creative literary style. Bunyan’s influence extends even over those who reject his basic values or have never read his work—the popular magazine Vanity Fair takes its name from a large community’s market in Pilgrim’s Progress, for Bunyan a place of temptation to avoid. Another of many of Bunyan’s phrases to enter popular culture is “Slough of Despond.”

As an author, Bunyan still continues to exert influence. C. S. Lewis, the author of the Narnia stories and a popular Christian writer, was inspired by Bunyan to write a modern Christian allegory, which he entitled The Pilgrim’s Regress. Pilgrim’s Progress had a discernible impact on such classic literature as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and, of course, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, as well as dozens of lesser-known modern works. It was made into an opera by Ralph Vaughan Williams and more recently into a rock opera.

More important to Bunyan would have been the religious legacy of his writing. When Bunyan wrote his classic work, he was expressing the values of a persecuted minority. With time, however, and certainly helped by the wide popularity of Pilgrim’s Progress, Puritan beliefs became more and more mainstream, until today many of their convictions are widely held in the Protestant community worldwide. Bunyan’s understanding of conversion, of Christian mistrust of society, of the role of the individual, and of the authority of scripture are shared by the majority of Christians in Britain and the United States today. Perhaps the greatest testimony to how widely accepted Pilgrim’s Progress is by modern Christians is the inclusion of Christian’s hymn “He Who Would Valiant Be” in the Church of England hymnal.