The Historical Impact of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress

There is a peculiar kind of grace that attaches itself to words written in chains. The Apostle Paul knew it. Jeremiah knew it. And a tinker’s son from Bedfordshire, England, a mender of pots and a preacher without a pulpit, came to know it too. When John Bunyan took up his pen inside Bedford County Gaol sometime around 1667, he could not have imagined that the story forming in his mind would outlast empires, cross oceans, shape nations, and speak comfort into the hearts of hundreds of millions of souls. He was writing because he could not stop writing. The Word burned in him like a fire.

What follows is the story of that book, not merely Bunyan’s story, but the story of a text that became a companion to the persecuted, a teacher to the illiterate, a missionary before missionaries arrived, and a mirror in which generation after generation has seen its own spiritual face. The Pilgrim’s Progress is arguably the most influential piece of Christian literature ever written outside of Scripture itself. To trace its history is to trace the movement of the Holy Spirit through print and picture, through empire and revival, through war and peace, through drawing room and jungle path alike.

This is the story of how one man’s dream, written down in prison, published to immediate wonder, and carried to the ends of the earth, refused to stop being relevant.

John Bunyan was no stranger to suffering before he ever wrote a word of his great allegory. Born in 1628 in Elstow, Bedfordshire, he grew up in modest poverty, served in the Parliamentary army during the English Civil War, and came to Christian faith through a prolonged and agonizing spiritual crisis that he would later describe in his autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. By the time he had become a lay preacher for a Nonconformist congregation in Bedford, the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 had made such preaching a criminal act. In November of that year, Bunyan was arrested for preaching without a license from the Church of England. He would spend the next twelve years in Bedford Gaol, refusing the easy terms of release that would have required him to stop preaching.

It was in that prison, a damp, overcrowded cell that smelled of mold and desperation, that Bunyan began writing what would become The Pilgrim’s Progress. The exact dates are debated by scholars, but most place the composition of the First Part between roughly 1667 and 1672, during a period of relative leniency when Bunyan was permitted certain materials. The allegorical dream-vision of Christian fleeing the City of Destruction and journeying toward the Celestial City emerged not from a comfortable study but from a place of confinement. That origin matters. Bunyan wrote as one who had himself borne a great burden on his back, who had himself passed through the Slough of Despond, who knew firsthand the dark valleys that lie between salvation and glory.

Christopher Hill, in his landmark study of Bunyan’s relationship to his turbulent era, situates the allegory squarely within the political and spiritual upheaval of seventeenth-century England. Hill argues that Bunyan’s religious imagination was forged in the fires of a society that had just lived through civil war, regicide, and the collapse of Puritan hopes, and that The Pilgrim’s Progress carries within it the memory of that struggle.[1] The journey of Christian is not a merely private spiritual exercise; it is the journey of an entire social class, the poor, the dissenting, the marginalized, toward a dignity and a destination that the powerful of this world cannot take from them. The prison cell, in other words, was not incidental to the book. It was constitutive of it.

There is something deeply providential in all of this. The very act of imprisoning John Bunyan in order to silence him produced the conditions under which his voice would become immortal. The authorities of Bedford and the Crown may have thought they were stopping a preacher. They were, in ways they could never have imagined, launching a publishing phenomenon.

When the First Part of The Pilgrim’s Progress appeared in print in 1678, published by Nathaniel Ponder in London, it was met with a reception that astonished even its author. The book sold out rapidly and went through multiple editions within its first year. W.R. Owens, examining the early English reception of the work, notes that it was reprinted eleven times during Bunyan’s lifetime alone, an extraordinary figure for the era, and that it quickly crossed the lines of class that might have been expected to limit its audience.

Owens demonstrates that the book’s readership was remarkably broad from the outset: the educated and the laboring poor, churchmen and Dissenters, adults and children all found something in its pages.[2] This breadth was not accidental. Bunyan wrote in English prose of uncommon vitality, shaped by the cadences of the King James Bible, energized by the vernacular speech of working people, and structured by the narrative logic of the popular literature of his day. His allegory was intellectually serious enough to satisfy the learned, and plainspoken enough to be read aloud to those who could not read themselves. That double audience would characterize the book’s readership for centuries to come.

Critics existed from the beginning, of course. Some objected to the fictional form itself, questioning whether a Christian truth could be legitimately wrapped in a made-up story. Bunyan himself anticipated this objection and addressed it in verse in his preface. But the objections were overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of ordinary readers who recognized in Christian’s journey their own experience of grace, doubt, temptation, and perseverance. The book spoke to something that no formal theological treatise quite reached, the felt texture of spiritual life as it is actually lived, with its fears and falls and sudden, merciful recoveries.

By the end of the seventeenth century, The Pilgrim’s Progress was already being spoken of in a different category from most books. It was not merely popular. It was felt to be necessary. Families passed it down through generations alongside the Bible. Preachers referenced it as a common point of shared understanding. The allegory had become, in less than a generation, something close to a second Scripture for the English Protestant world.

Six years after the publication of Part I, Bunyan released the Second Part of The Pilgrim’s Progress in 1684. Where the First Part had followed Christian, a solitary, burdened, anxious male pilgrim, on his solitary quest, the Second Part told the story of his wife Christiana and their children making the same journey, this time with a guide, Great-heart, to accompany them. The Second Part is in many ways a gentler book. The loneliness and terror of the First Part give way to something more communal, more domestic, more confident in the safety of the way.

Scholars have debated whether the Second Part represents a theological softening or simply a different angle of vision. What is clear is that it expanded the allegorical world of the text considerably. New characters, new locations, new conversations enriched the landscape through which the pilgrim family travels. And by including women and children as the central pilgrims, Bunyan democratized the spiritual journey in a way that would prove enormously consequential for the book’s future readers. Women who might have felt themselves at the margins of Christian’s anxious, individualistic quest could now see themselves at the center of Christiana’s communal one.

Vincent Newey, in his critical survey of the allegorical tradition in which Bunyan worked, emphasizes how the two parts together create a more complete theological vision than either alone, a vision in which solitary conversion and communal discipleship are held in balance.[3] The combination of the two parts also gave the book greater staying power in the century to come, since different readers could find their own experience more fully reflected in one part or the other. The two-part Pilgrim’s Progress became the standard form of the text, and it is in that combined form that the book would go on to conquer the world.

By the early eighteenth century, The Pilgrim’s Progress had settled into the permanent furnishing of English Protestant households in a way that no other book besides the Bible could claim. In cottage and farmhouse, in the homes of weavers and carpenters and small tradesmen, a family Bible and a copy of Bunyan’s allegory constituted what cultural historians have sometimes called “the commoner’s library,” the two books that an ordinary working Englishman or woman was most likely to have encountered, most likely to have read repeatedly, and most likely to draw upon for their framework of meaning and moral vocabulary.

This identification of The Pilgrim’s Progress with the spiritual life of the English laboring poor is a theme that E.P. Thompson, the great historian of the English working class, has explored with characteristic insight. Thompson traces the way in which Bunyan’s categories, the burden of sin, the difficulty of the way, the treachery of worldly compromise, the fellowship of true pilgrims, became deeply embedded in the consciousness of Nonconformist and Methodist working people across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The allegory provided not merely religious consolation but a framework of social dignity: the poor reader who knew himself to be a pilgrim bound for the Celestial City could not be wholly crushed by the contempt of the wealthy world through which he traveled.

Thompson observes that the influence of texts like The Pilgrim’s Progress on English popular culture was so deep and pervasive that it shaped the moral imagination of working-class radicalism as well as its piety, that the language of the pilgrimage became a language of social endurance and resistance alike.[4] There is perhaps no greater testimony to Bunyan’s genius than this: that a book written by a tinker for tinkers should have become the imaginative home of an entire social class for two centuries.

When the fires of evangelical revival swept through the English-speaking world in the eighteenth century, beginning with the Wesleyan awakening in England and its parallel in the American Great Awakening led by figures such as George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, The Pilgrim’s Progress was already waiting to receive the newly converted. The book’s account of the experience of new birth, of the weight of sin falling from the believer’s shoulders at the foot of the cross, of the struggle with worldly temptation that followed, mapped directly onto the emotional and spiritual grammar of the revivalist experience.

John Wesley himself commended Bunyan’s allegory repeatedly and included works by and about Bunyan in his famous Christian Library, the collected readings he produced for the edification of his Methodist societies. George Whitefield, whose open-air preaching drew thousands to conversion in England and America alike, was steeped in Bunyan’s vision of the Christian life as a pilgrimage through hostile territory. For the newly awakened converts who poured into Methodist and Baptist chapels across two continents, The Pilgrim’s Progress became the primary imaginative context within which they understood their new life of faith.

In the American colonies and then the early Republic, the book’s influence was similarly profound. It was one of the most widely owned books in colonial households. Cotton Mather commended it; Benjamin Franklin’s father read it to his children. The Puritan imagination that had already shaped New England found in Bunyan’s allegory a perfect crystallization of its vision of human life as a journey through spiritual danger toward a heavenly home. The Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s deepened and widened this influence, as hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans encountered the experience of conviction, conversion, and new life that the allegory described.

The literary historians of the eighteenth century have long recognized that The Pilgrim’s Progress occupies an anomalous but crucial position in the history of the English novel. It was not itself a novel in the modern sense, it was an allegory, an extended dream vision in the tradition of medieval literature. But its prose technique, its creation of a sustained narrative populated by psychologically vivid characters, its use of dialogue and scene-setting to carry a moral argument, and above all its sheer readability, made it one of the most important precursors of the form that would come to dominate English literature.

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which many scholars regard as the first English novel proper, bears the unmistakable imprint of Bunyan’s techniques, the first-person narrator wrestling with providence and survival, the journal form, the moral accountability of every action. John Bunyan had demonstrated that plain English prose, the kind spoken and understood by ordinary people, could sustain a long narrative of spiritual and moral consequence. The novel as a form would take that demonstration and carry it in secular directions, but the demonstration itself was Bunyan’s.

Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and later writers acknowledged or worked against Bunyan’s legacy even when they did not directly mention it. The concern with individual moral experience, with the inner life of conscience, with the drama of temptation and choice, all of these, which lie at the heart of the English novel tradition, were already fully present in The Pilgrim’s Progress. One of the great ironic legacies of a Nonconformist prisoner’s allegory is that it helped to teach the English language how to tell a story.

Among the many editions of The Pilgrim’s Progress that appeared in the long century between Bunyan’s death in 1688 and the explosion of nineteenth-century missionary activity, the 1797 edition edited and annotated by George Burder deserves special attention. Burder, a Nonconformist minister and one of the founders of the London Missionary Society, produced an edition that was designed not merely to reprint the text but to commend it to a new generation of readers with fresh scholarly and devotional apparatus.

The Burder edition included introductory materials, explanatory notes keyed to specific passages, and a careful attention to the theological dimensions of the allegory that made it useful for serious study as well as devotional reading. It was one of a series of editorial interventions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that worked to stabilize the text and fix its cultural meaning as a work of serious Protestant devotion rather than merely popular entertainment. These editorial decisions, about what Bunyan meant, which passages needed explanation, how the allegory mapped onto Christian experience, would shape how millions of subsequent readers understood the book. It is the tradition of Burder’s segmentation of ten stages that the edition you now are reading carries on. 

The Burder edition also appeared at precisely the moment when the modern missionary movement was gathering force. The London Missionary Society, in which Burder played a founding role, was established in 1795, just two years before his edition appeared. The alignment was not coincidental. The theological convictions that drove the missionary movement, the urgency of conversion, the universality of the Gospel, the absolute need of every human being for the grace of God, were precisely the convictions that animated Bunyan’s allegory. The Burder edition helped to position The Pilgrim’s Progress as a natural companion and resource for the missionary enterprise that was about to transform the world.

No dimension of the book’s history is more remarkable than its global spread through the missionary movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Isabel Hofmeyr, in her groundbreaking study of the translation and circulation of The Pilgrim’s Progress across the British Empire, documents with painstaking care how the allegory traveled to virtually every corner of the world carried by Protestant missionaries, and how it was translated into hundreds of languages in the process.[5] By the end of the nineteenth century, The Pilgrim’s Progress had been translated into more languages than any other book except the Bible itself.

Hofmeyr’s analysis reveals the complexity of this global journey. The missionaries who carried The Pilgrim’s Progress to Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands, and beyond believed they were bringing a universally applicable spiritual truth. And in many respects they were. But they were also bringing a deeply English cultural artifact, with its specific social geography, its particular vision of what a town looks like and what a fair looks like and what a giant looks like. The work of translation therefore involved not merely linguistic transfer but cultural negotiation, the translators and their local collaborators had to decide which elements of Bunyan’s English landscape could be carried intact into a new cultural context, and which needed to be adapted or replaced.

The illustrations that accompanied many missionary editions of the text played a particularly important role in this process of cultural translation. Nathalie Collé-Bak has shown how the visual tradition associated with The Pilgrim’s Progress, the images of Christian at the wicket gate, carrying his burden to the cross, fighting Apollyon, crossing the River of Death, became a kind of parallel text that could communicate the allegory’s meaning across language barriers.[6] In some missionary contexts, the pictures reached people who had not yet learned to read the words. The image of a figure struggling under a burden, setting it down at the foot of the cross and walking free, required no translation at all. It spoke in the universal language of spiritual longing.

In Victorian England, The Pilgrim’s Progress achieved something approaching the status of a national scripture. It was read in schools, quoted in sermons, referenced in novels, and cited as the foundational text of English moral character. The extraordinary expansion of literacy during the Victorian era, driven by Sunday schools, mechanics’ institutes, and later by compulsory elementary education, brought millions of new readers to Bunyan’s text, and the book occupied a central place in the reading curriculum of working-class and lower-middle-class education.

The Victorian reading of The Pilgrim’s Progress tended to emphasize its moral rather than its theological dimensions, the virtues of perseverance, integrity, courage, and faithful friendship that Christian and his companions display on their journey. This was a somewhat selective reading, as Bunyan’s own primary concern was theological: the journey was about salvation, not character formation. But the Victorian emphasis on character, on self-improvement, on the duty of every individual to press forward through difficulty toward a worthy goal, found in Bunyan’s allegory a congenial imaginative home. Samuel Smiles, the great Victorian apostle of self-help, could draw on the same vocabulary as the most orthodox Calvinist preacher, because both were saturated in the language of Bunyan.

The great Victorian novelists were also deeply shaped by the allegory. George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy all engage with Bunyan’s world either directly or implicitly. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) opens with the March girls playing at pilgrimage, explicitly using The Pilgrim’s Progress as a framework for the moral journey of growing up. That a book written by a seventeenth-century Calvinist tinker should become the governing metaphor for a beloved American novel about girlhood in New England is one of the more remarkable testimonies to the allegory’s cultural reach.

The famous “What Would Jesus Do?” movement of the 1890s, which swept through American evangelical Christianity and gave the world a phrase that remains culturally recognizable to this day, had its literary roots in a novel called In His Steps, published in 1896 by the Congregationalist minister Charles Sheldon. But Sheldon’s novel was itself deeply indebted to the tradition of Christian allegory that Bunyan had established, the tradition of asking, in a concrete narrative form, what faithful Christian discipleship looks like as it walks through the ordinary world.

The WWJD movement’s emphasis on moment-by-moment moral decision-making, on the question of how a Christian should act in each specific situation encountered along the way, directly echoes Bunyan’s method. Christian and his companions are constantly facing choices,  whether to take the easy path or the hard one, whether to trust the guide or follow their own judgment, whether to stop and rest at dangerous places or press on. The allegory is fundamentally a sustained meditation on moral decision-making under pressure. The WWJD bracelet worn by millions of American evangelical teenagers in the 1990s was, in a very real sense, a descendant of Bunyan’s wicket gate.

More broadly, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw a flowering of Christian allegory and moral fiction that drew explicitly on Bunyan’s model. Works like Hinds’ Feet on High Places by Hannah Hurnard (1955) and Hind’s Feet, Mountains High by others adapted the Bunyanian journey narrative for new generations of readers. The idea that the Christian life could be told as a story of a journey, with specific obstacles, temptations, companions, and destinations, was so deeply established in Protestant imaginative culture that it had become virtually the default form for Christian narrative fiction. Bunyan had established the template, and his successors were still writing within it three centuries later.

No twentieth-century Christian writer engaged more deliberately and fruitfully with the legacy of The Pilgrim’s Progress than C.S. Lewis. Lewis admired Bunyan deeply, defended him against condescending critics, and drew on the allegorical tradition Bunyan represented throughout his own work. His 1933 allegorical autobiography The Pilgrim’s Regress is an explicit homage and dialogue with Bunyan, tracing Lewis’s own intellectual and spiritual journey from materialism to Christianity in Bunyanian form, complete with allegorical characters and a wandering pilgrim.

Lewis went further, however, than simple homage. In The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis extended and transformed the Bunyanian tradition in ways that spoke to the particular spiritual conditions of the twentieth century. Where Bunyan’s world was essentially binary, the City of Destruction and the Celestial City, the world and God, damnation and salvation, Lewis’s allegorical worlds were more epistemologically complex, more attuned to the subtle ways in which modern people resist and evade grace. But the fundamental narrative movement, from ignorance and bondage toward truth and freedom, through a journey beset by temptation and illuminated by grace, remained recognizably Bunyanian.

Lewis also played a significant role in the twentieth-century critical rehabilitation of Bunyan. In an era when academic literary criticism had largely dismissed Bunyan as a popular but aesthetically limited writer, Lewis insisted on his greatness, the greatness of his prose, the accuracy of his psychology, the universality of his spiritual vision. Lewis’s championship of Bunyan as a serious literary artist helped to open the door to the more substantial academic engagement with the allegory that would come in the latter half of the century, and ensured that a new generation of educated readers would encounter the text with respect rather than condescension.

In both World Wars, The Pilgrim’s Progress served as a source of comfort and spiritual sustenance for soldiers, prisoners, chaplains, and the families of the fallen in ways that are deeply moving to contemplate. The allegory’s landscape, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the battle with Apollyon, the crossing of the final river, mapped with terrible precision onto the actual landscape through which men were living and dying. Soldiers who had grown up with the book in Sunday school or heard it read aloud at home found its imagery rising to meet their experience in the trenches.

Military chaplains distributed copies of The Pilgrim’s Progress alongside the New Testament as part of their standard kit. Letters home from the First World War frequently draw on Bunyan’s imagery, the Valley, the Slough, the Hill Difficulty, as a vocabulary for describing what was otherwise indescribable. The allegory had given generations of English-speaking Christians a set of images for the experience of spiritual and physical suffering that proved, in the worst conditions of modern warfare, to be not metaphors but almost literal descriptions.

In prisoner-of-war camps on multiple fronts, copies of The Pilgrim’s Progress circulated among captives and were read with an intensity of identification that their first readers in Bedford Gaol might have recognized. The pilgrim who presses forward through imprisonment and threat without losing his destination, this was not merely a spiritual type but a practical model for the endurance of captivity. The book that was written in prison found, in the prisons of wartime, some of its most urgent and personal readers. There is a symmetry in that which speaks to the book’s deepest character.

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen The Pilgrim’s Progress migrate from the printed page into virtually every medium that modern culture has developed for storytelling. Film adaptations appeared as early as 1912, with subsequent versions in 1978 and a full-length animated adaptation in 2019. Radio dramatizations have been produced by the BBC and by independent Christian broadcasters. Musical settings, theatrical productions, opera adaptations, and graphic novel versions have all sought to translate Bunyan’s allegory into new forms for new audiences.

Each of these adaptations involves the same fundamental negotiation that the nineteenth-century missionary translators faced, the question of what is essential to the allegory and what is culturally contingent, what must be preserved and what can be transformed. The 2019 animated film, produced by Revelation Media, updated the visual world of the allegory significantly while preserving its theological spine. It found a global audience among evangelical Christians, particularly in Africa and Asia, communities that are themselves the direct descendants of the missionary translations Hofmeyr documented.

In the digital age, The Pilgrim’s Progress has found new life through audio readings, podcast adaptations, free e-book distributions, and social media engagement. Because the text is in the public domain, it is among the most freely available works in the history of Christian literature, accessible to anyone in the world with an internet connection at no cost whatsoever. The same democratizing impulse that drove Bunyan to write in plain English for ordinary readers, the same impulse that drove missionary translators to carry the text to the ends of the earth, finds its contemporary expression in the essentially universal availability of the text online. A reader in rural Uganda or urban Seoul can access The Pilgrim’s Progress as easily as a seminary professor in Oxford.

The academic rehabilitation of Bunyan as a major literary and cultural figure has been one of the more significant developments in English studies over the past half-century. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite, or perhaps because of, his enormous popular influence, Bunyan occupied an awkward position in the academic literary canon. He was too popular to be taken entirely seriously by those who equated literary value with difficulty and exclusivity. Heesok Choi, examining Bunyan’s identity as a Dissenter, argues that this cultural marginalization mirrored the social marginalization of Nonconformity itself, that the academy’s discomfort with Bunyan was in part a discomfort with the class and religious tradition he represented.[7]

The second half of the twentieth century saw a substantial change in this situation. The rise of cultural history, the growing interest in popular literature and its social meanings, and the influence of scholars like Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, and Roger Sharrock brought Bunyan into the center of academic attention. Hill’s political and social reading of Bunyan, situating the allegory within the radical religious culture of seventeenth-century England, was particularly influential, opening up new ways of understanding the text’s meanings and its historical significance. The Pilgrim’s Progress was no longer merely a pious classic; it was a document in the history of dissent, of popular culture, of the struggle for religious freedom.

More recently, postcolonial scholarship has brought a further dimension to the academic conversation about the book. Hofmeyr’s work on the missionary translations challenged scholars to think about The Pilgrim’s Progress as a global text whose history includes not only English Protestant culture but the colonial encounter in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, and the complex ways in which colonized peoples received, adapted, resisted, and ultimately claimed the allegory for their own. This scholarship has made the story of The Pilgrim’s Progress both more complicated and more interesting, revealing a text whose global journey is a mirror of the complex history of Christianity in the modern world.

Today, The Pilgrim’s Progress stands before the world as what we might fittingly call a public domain giant, a work whose cultural and spiritual influence is incalculable, whose availability is essentially universal, and whose capacity to speak across centuries, cultures, and circumstances remains undiminished. With no copyright standing between any reader and the text, no publisher controlling its distribution, no gatekeeper managing its translation, the book belongs to all humanity in a way that few works of any kind can claim.

The statistics of its reach are staggering. The Pilgrim’s Progress has been translated into more than two hundred languages. It has never been out of print since its first publication in 1678, a publishing record almost certainly unmatched by any other book in the English language except the Bible itself. It has been read by monarchs and by prisoners, by theologians and by people who never read any other book, by children working through their first serious prose and by scholars spending careers in its analysis. Every generation since Bunyan’s own has found in it a sufficient account of the spiritual life.

What accounts for this extraordinary durability? The answer has to do, ultimately, with the nature of what Bunyan described. The burden of guilt and the longing for release. The difficulty of the way and the faithfulness of the guide. The companions who help and the adversaries who hinder. The moments of doubt and the moments of vision. The long stretches of ordinary walking between the great crises. The final river and what lies beyond it. These are not merely seventeenth-century English experiences. They are the universal experiences of every human soul that has ever set out, however uncertainly, in the direction of God. Bunyan gave them a story. And the story, it turns out, belongs to the world.

That a tinker’s son, writing in a jail cell, with a Bible and a burning conviction, could produce a work of such universal reach is itself a kind of parable — one that Bunyan himself would surely have recognized. It is the parable of the grain of wheat that falls into the ground and, in dying to its own smallness, brings forth fruit that no one can count. The Pilgrim’s Progress is that grain of wheat. Its harvest is still being gathered in.

Endnotes

1. Christopher Hill, “John Bunyan and the English Revolution,” in Bunyan Studies (1988), repr. in Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and His Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 3–35. Hill situates the allegory within the social and political upheaval of seventeenth-century Nonconformist England.
2. W.R. Owens, “The Reception of The Pilgrim’s Progress in England,” in Bunyan in England and Abroad, ed. M. van Os and G.J. Schutte (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990), 91–111.
3. Vincent Newey, “The Pilgrim’s Progress: Critical and Historical Views,” in The Pilgrim’s Progress: Critical and Historical Views, ed. Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1980), 1–41.
4. E.P. Thompson, “Bunyan’s Progress: A View from the Left,” The Guardian, November 1988. Thompson’s analysis of Bunyan’s influence on English working-class moral and political consciousness appears across his broader body of work, particularly in The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963).
5. Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). See also Hofmeyr, “How Bunyan Became English: Missionaries, Translation, and the Discipline of English Literature,” Journal of British Studies 41, no. 1 (2002): 84–119.
6. Nathalie Collé-Bak, “Spreading the Written Word through Images: The Circulation of The Pilgrim’s Progress via its Illustrations,” Word & Image 24, no. 2 (2008): 133–144.
7. Heesok Choi, “John Bunyan as a Dissenter,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan, ed. Michael Davies and W.R. Owens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 45–62.