Bunyan

Bunyan, JOHN, author of the Pilgrim's Progress, was born at Elstow, near Bedford, in 1628. His father describes himself in his will, the original of which is still in existence, as a 'braseyer,' and is ordinarily spoken of as a tinker, in which craft his eldest son John was duly trained. Sir Walter Scott, in the Quarterly Review of 1830, started the idea that, as Gypsies were frequently tinkers, Bunyan may have belonged to the Gypsy race. Recent researches, however, have shown that there is no historical basis for the suggestion. The name originally took the form Buingnon, and the family were certainly in Bedfordshire in 1199, if not earlier. There is also documentary evidence connecting them with the identical spot where Bunyan was born, in the east fields of Elstow, as early as 1327. From the Court Roll of the manor of Elstow we find that Thomas Bonyon did fealty and suit of court for his cottage and nine acres of land to the lord of the manor in 1542 and on to 1550. In a minute of the Privy-council he is described as 'Bonyon, victualler,' and in the Court Roll of the manor as a 'common brewer of beer' and as a 'common baker of human bread.' He probably kept a little roadside inn in his cottage on the bridge-road between Bedford and Wilstead. The place where he lived is also described in the same record as 'Bonyon's End,' that is, the end or extremity of the parish where the Bunyans lived. This is the name which it had evidently borne for a long time previously, and it is the name by which that part of Elstow has continued to be known down to our own day. The grandson of this Thomas Bonyon, who was Bunyan's grandfather, describes himself in his will as a 'pettie chapman,' or small village trader. According to the transcript registers from the parish of Elstow, Bunyan's father married Margaret

Bentley on the 23d May 1627, and on the 30th November 1628 their illustrious son was baptised at Elstow Church. When he was in his sixteenth year his mother and his sister Margaret died within a month of each other; and the following year Bunyan, probably under the action of a levy made by parliament upon the villages of Bedfordshire, was drafted into the army, and took part in the civil war between Roundhead and Royalist. Probably not for long, however, as he did not reach the army regulation age of sixteen till November 1644, and in June 1645 the battle of Naseby practically put an end to the war. On the disbanding of the army, Bunyan returned to Elstow, and about 1649 married a wife who brought him no dower of worldly wealth, for, says he, 'this woman and I came together as poor as poor might be, not having so much household stuff as a dish or spoon betwixt us both.' She brought with her, however, two books which had belonged to her father, the Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven, and the Practice of Piety, in which they read together, and by which Bunyan was considerably influenced. His Life and Death of Mr Badman, which he published in 1680, shows not a little resemblance to the first of these books. During these early days of his wedded life, he lived in the cottage at the entrance of the village of Elstow, now known as Bunyan's cottage, the house in which he was born being in the fields about a mile to the east. It was while living here that his blind child was born, and that he took such pleasure in ringing the bells in the tower of Elstow Church. It was here also that he began to pass through those deep religious experiences which he has described so vividly in his Grace Abounding.

During this time he was introduced by some good people at Bedford to their minister, John Gifford, a converted royalist major who had organised a little community, sometimes incorrectly described as a Baptist church, it being a church in which baptism and some other questions much debated in those days were left to the individual conscience, and not made an essential part of church life. Bunyan joined this Christian fellowship in 1653, and about 1655 he was asked by the brethren to address them in their church gatherings. This led to his beginning to preach in the villages round Bedford, and in 1656 he was brought into discussions with the followers of George Fox, which issued in his appearance as an author, his first book, Some Gospel Truths Opened, being published against the Quakers in 1656. This earliest effort of his pen, though rapidly written, is a vigorous production, and altogether remarkable as the composition of a working-man whose school-days had become a far-off memory. To this Edward Burrough, an eminent Quaker, replied, and Bunyan gave rejoinder in A Vindication of Gospel Truths Opened. Two other works were published by him, after which, in the month of November 1660, he was arrested while preaching in a farmhouse at Samsell, a little hamlet a few miles south of Ampt-hill. The imprisonment which followed upon this arrest lasted for twelve long years, during which Bunyan wrote Profitable Meditations, Praying in the Spirit, Christian Behaviour, The Holy City, The Resurrection of the Dead, Grace Abounding, and some smaller works. This imprisonment was in the county gaol, which stood at the corner of the High Street and Silver Street, in the centre of the town of Bedford. Bunyan was released after the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, under which he became a licensed preacher, having been chosen by the church to which he belonged as their pastor. He had occupied this position for three years, when in the month of February 1675 the Declaration of Indulgence was cancelled, and the licenses of the

Nonconformist preachers recalled by proclamation. The following month, March 4, a warrant, signed by no fewer than thirteen magistrates, and sealed by ten out of the thirteen, was issued for his arrest. This warrant turns out to have been preserved among the Chauncy MSS., and came to light in July 1887 when these were brought to the hammer at Messrs Sotheby's. Brought to trial at the midsummer sessions under the Conventicle Act, Bunyan was sent to prison for six months in the town gaol on Bedford Bridge. It was during this later and briefer imprisonment, and not during the twelve years in the county gaol, that he wrote the first part of his memorable work, the Pilgrim's Progress. This was entered in the register of the Stationers' Company, 22d December 1677, and in a contemporary catalogue of books appears as licensed February 18, 1678. When first issued it was shorter than it afterwards became. It then contained no Mr Worldly Wiseman, and no second meeting with Evangelist. The discourse with Charity at the Palace Beautiful, the further accounts of Mr By-end's rich relations, the story of Diffidence, the wife of Giant Despair, and various other passages, were added afterwards in the second and third editions, which appeared in the autumn of 1678 and the early part of 1679. This was followed by the Life and Death of Mr Badman in 1680; by the Holy War, his most memorable work after the Pilgrim's Progress, in 1682; and by the second part of the Pilgrim, containing the story of Christiana and her children, in 1684. Bunyan had been pastor of the Bedford Church for sixteen years, when, after a ride through the rain on horseback from Reading to London, he was seized with a fatal illness at the house of his friend, John Strudwick, a grocer at the sign of the Star on Suow Hill, Holborn, and here he died on the 31st August 1688, and was buried in the Campo Santo of the Nonconformists in Bunhill Fields.

During the sixty years of his life, Bunyan wrote something like sixty books, but he will be best remembered by three of these—the Grace Abounding, the Holy War, and the Pilgrim's Progress, and best of all by the last of the three. The Pilgrim's Progress sprang at once into fame, 100,000 copies being sold during the subsequent ten years of its author's life. It was also printed at Boston, in New England, in 1681, and a Dutch translation was issued by Joannes Boekholt of Amsterdam in 1682. This last and a subsequent edition of a superior character, issued in 1685, were illustrated by Dutch engravers, then the leaders of the art of engraving in Europe. The book was also translated into Welsh, Walloon French, German, Polish, and Swedish, between 1688 and 1743. Since then it has been translated into no fewer than eighty-four languages and dialects, the versions in Japanese and the Canton vernacular being admirably illustrated by native artists, who have adapted the scenery and costumes to those of their own country. Traces of the influence of the work upon Schiller have been pointed out in his two poems, 'Der Pilgrim' and 'Die Sehnsucht,' by Gustav Kettner; and Wieland mentions that he first learned English from the Pilgrim's Progress. Of the English issue six copies of the first edition of the first part are in existence, and a complete series of editions down to the thirty-fourth, with the exception of the seventeenth. Since the thirty-fourth no record has been kept, the editions becoming in number numberless. An incomplete folio edition of Bunyan's general works was published in one volume in 1692, and complete editions in two volumes folio were issued in 1736-37, and in 1767. A folio edition in one thick volume of 1112 pages, double columns, was also published in Edinburgh by Henry Galbraith in 1771, and various other collected editions in quarto and octavo were subsequently issued in England, Scotland, and America. A statue of Bunyan was unveiled in Bedford in 1874. See the Lives of him by Southey (1830), Offer (1862), Froude (1880), and the present writer (1885; new ed. 1888).