The Pilgrim's Progress Summary: Bunyan's Allegory of the Road to the Celestial City
What The Pilgrim's Progress is about
The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come is a Christian allegory published in 1678. Its author, John Bunyan, was an English nonconformist preacher who began the book while held in the Bedfordshire county prison for breaching the Conventicle Act 1664, a law that banned religious services held outside the Church of England. Early scholars such as John Brown placed the writing in Bunyan's shorter six-month imprisonment of 1675. More recent scholars, including Roger Sharrock, argue it was begun during the longer stretch from 1660 to 1672, shortly after Bunyan finished his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.
The whole book is framed as a dream, told by an omniscient narrator. The dreamer sees a man named Christian, an everyman figure, living in the City of Destruction. Christian is crushed under a great burden on his back, which stands for the knowledge of his own sin, and which he believes came from reading the book in his hand (the Bible). The burden is unbearable, and he becomes convinced it will drag him down to Hell. So he leaves. His destination is the Celestial City on Mount Zion, which the title calls "that which is to come".
What follows is a journey told as a map. Every place Christian passes through is a state of mind or a spiritual danger given a name and a landscape. He sinks into the Slough of Despond, a bog thickened with the doubts, fears, lusts, shames and guilts of sinners. He is pulled out by a character called Help. He is talked off the road by Mr Worldly Wiseman, who recommends a man called Legality in the village of Morality, an allegory for trying to shed sin through good conduct and law-keeping rather than through Christ. He climbs the Hill of Difficulty, rests at the House of the Interpreter, and stops for three nights at the Palace Beautiful, leaving dressed in the Armour of God. The text runs to around 108,260 words and has no chapters. It is one continuous narrative, split into two parts. The First Part was entered in the Stationers' Register on 22 December 1677 and licensed in February 1678. An expanded edition followed in 1679 with material written after Bunyan's release. The Second Part appeared in 1684.
The main characters
Christian carries the story. He is deliberately unspecific, a stand-in for any believer, and his defining act in the opening pages is to leave his home, his wife and his children behind because he cannot persuade them to come with him.
Nearly every other figure is a walking idea. Evangelist points him towards the Wicket Gate and later rescues him from the detour into Morality. Obstinate chases him to bring him home and gives up in disgust. Pliable follows out of self-interest, hoping for the paradise Christian describes, then scrambles out of the Slough of Despond and goes back. Goodwill is the gatekeeper who sets Christian on the King's Highway and protects him from Beelzebub's archers. Along the road come Simple, Sloth and Presumption, who ignore good advice, and Formality and Hypocrisy, false Christians who take fatal shortcuts named Danger and Destruction. Mistrust and Timorous try to scare him off with tales of lions. The lions turn out to be chained, placed there to test the faith of pilgrims.
The themes
Redemption is the engine. Christian's burden does not come off through effort, reform or respectability. It falls away at the place of deliverance, the cross and the open tomb, and rolls into the sepulchre. The three angels who meet him there give him peace, new clothes and a scroll that serves as his passport. That moment arrives surprisingly early, which tells you the book is less interested in conversion than in what comes afterwards.
The second theme is morality, and specifically Bunyan's suspicion of it. Worldly Wiseman, Legality and Civility are exposed as frauds, not because decency is bad but because it cannot carry the weight Christian puts on it. Running underneath both is the matter of perseverance. Christian loses his scroll by falling asleep and has to walk back for it. The road is narrow and full of people who turn around.
Why it still matters
The book has never been out of print and has been translated into more than two hundred languages. A North American edition appeared in 1681, the same year as a Dutch edition, with German following in 1703 and Swedish in 1727. Eleven editions of the First Part appeared in Bunyan's own lifetime. It has a claim to being the first novel written in English.
Its reach beyond religion is the surprising part. The literary editor Robert McCrum argued that no book in English apart from the Bible matches it for breadth of readership or influence, naming Hogarth, C. S. Lewis, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickens, Alcott, Shaw, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Twain, Steinbeck and Enid Blyton among those who drew on it. The hymn "To be a Pilgrim" takes its words from the book. The Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair entered ordinary English and stayed there. Readers who want a plainly told story about choosing a hard road, or anyone interested in where the English novel came from, will find the journey worth taking.
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