Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, and Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

An LCS Book LATCH Collection Series, No. 1

Texting Bunyan Essays on Attribution, Influence, and Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Ken Simpson, Editor

2010

Cuyahoga Falls, OH

Mt. Pleasant, TX

© 2010 by Open Latch Publications. No text in this publication may be copied and distributed for material profit without written permission from Open Latch Publications.

Open Latch Publications www.openlatch.com

An open-access pdf of this book is available as a LATCH Collection Series book at: www.openlatch.com

ISBN-10 (cloth): 0-9816803-6-4 ISBN-13 (cloth): 978-0-9816803-6-1

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Informational Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States

CONTENTS

Forward [vii]

List of Contributors [xi]

Note about the Text [xiii]

Chapter 1 Dating The Spiritual Warfare Broadsheet by Arlette Zinck 1

Chapter 2 Supra or Infra? Clarifying Bunyan’s Doctrine of Election by Galen Johnson 8

Chapter 3 Bunyan’s Doctrine of Predestination: A Historical Perspective by Richard L. Greaves 13

Chapter 4 Samuel Adams and the 1782 Edition of The Holy War by Bob McKelvey 22

Chapter 5 The Earliest Illustrations of The Pilgrim’s Progress: Notes & Queries by Roger Pooley 29

Chapter 6 George Offor and the Case of T. S. by Christopher Garrett 47

Chapter 7 The Providential and Scientific Seizures of Giant Despair by Ralph C. Wood 52

Chapter 8 Performing Bunyan: BBC Radio and The Pilgrim’s Progress by W. R. Owens 61

Chapter 9 A Roger Sharrock Item by Vincent Newey 66

Chapter 10 The Pilgrim’s Path: Sources from Stevington by Kathy Brown 69

Foreword

As Bunyan scholars know, “the old Recorder, whose name was Mr. Conscience,” plays a crucial role in The Holy War. He is one of three Lords of Mansoul attacked first and is the most feared by Diabolus, who sets up Forget-good in his place. Over the years, The Recorder has lived up to its name, if not its namesake, recording the main events in the life of the The International John Bunyan Society, and in the words of its second President, Neil Keeble, providing “our chief means of keeping in touch” (Recorder [Winter, 1996]: 2). While all scholarly newsletters perform these functions, The Recorder has also done much more: it has entertained and educated us, offering small scholarly morsels that authors knew would be savoured by Bunyan enthusiasts and scholars of seventeenth-century British culture alike. Because I came to believe that many essays and notes from The Recorder were worthy of a broader scholarly audience, and after only a slight hesitation (did the world really need another essay collection?), I accepted Matt Horn’s invitation to commemorate The Recorder by collecting the best contributions made to it during my time as editor. Now that I see all of the contributions together, I see just how important the newsletter has been in developing a scholarly community. This collection, then, commemorates The Recorder’s role in the life of the Bunyan Society, but it also offers, through Open Latch Publications, scholarly access to material that is significant but, until now, only known to members of the Bunyan Society. Named by James Forrest (1924-2005), the Bunyan Society’s Honorary President, The Recorder first appeared in June, 1993 and included as its epigraph, below the banner but before first President Richard Greaves’s (1938-2004) “Reflections” on page one, the following excerpt from The Holy War, also chosen by Dr. Forrest: “as for Mr. Recorder . . . he was a man well read in the laws of his King, and also a man of courage and faithfulness to speak truth at every occasion.” Shannon Murray was the first editor of the newsletter charged with making sure The Recorder spoke “truth at every occasion,” and editors of the newsletter have been indebted to her ever since. She was part of an industrious group of Dr. Forrest’s students at the University of Alberta that included Greg Randall (first Secretary), Aileen Ross (first Treasurer), Maxine Hancock, Arlette Zinck (current Treasurer), and David Gay (current Secretary), all of whom were instrumental in getting the Society off the ground. Shannon somehow found the time to edit two issues of The Recorder every year from 1993 to 1998, setting a very high standard. Even a quick glance through those early issues reveals the range of topics that still characterizes The Recorder and makes it unique among scholarly newsletters: conference announcements and calls for papers, book and conference reviews, reports about Bunyan studies in Germany and Japan, notes from the Bunyan Museum and Bedford Library, minutes and budget summaries from the Society’s business meetings, and a range of scholarly items from bibliographies and thesis announcements to abstracts and articles on pedagogy, theology, ecclesiology, iconography, and book history. Such breadth testifies to the vitality of the Society and Shannon’s dedication to serving it. Many of the changes to The Recorder that were introduced when I became editor (1999-2007) came as a result of the realization that I could never match Shannon’s energy. Publishing only once rather than twice a year gave me the opportunity to spend more time laying out visuals and photographs for the newsletter. In addition, the development of the World Wide Web and the creation of the Bunyan Homepage by David Gay in 1997 reduced the need for conference announcements (with the exception of the triennial Bunyan Conference), calls for papers, and other general information that could be found easily on the internet, resulting in more space for notes and short essays of the sort already being published during Shannon Murray’s editorship, and which continue to be emphasized in the newsletter today, under the guidance of Chris Garrett (2008-). It remains to be seen how much further The Recorder will change in response to electronic and interactive technologies. All the contributions collected here, with the exception of Chris Garrett’s “George Offor and the Case of T. S.” (Recorder 14 [2008]: 18-19), appeared between 1999-2007 while I was editor, but they also represent, as the title of the collection suggests, three recurrent kinds of scholarly work published in The Recorder—attributions, influences, and appropriations. In Garrett’s article we are introduced to an archival discovery of a George Offor letter that cautiously identifies Thomas Sherman as “T. S.,” the author of The Second Part of Pilgrim’s Progress (1682), one of the first appropriations of Bunyan’s allegory. Another scholarly discovery is recorded by Vincent Newey, in “A Roger Sharrock Item” (Recorder 6 [2000]: 1-2), which sheds light on the conventions of book reviewing and, therefore, the institutionalization of Bunyan. Newey discusses a letter by Roger Sharrock to Norman Nicholson, found in Nicholson’s copy of Sharrock’s edition of Grace Abounding, in which Sharrock praises the not-so-anonymous reviewer of his edition of Bunyan’s autobiography for the Times Literary Supplement. Reviewing is, of course, an important part of The Recorder, but it is not a scholarly activity represented here, except in Bob Owens’s, “Performing Bunyan: BBC Radio and The Pilgrim’s Progress” (Recorder 10 [2004]: 7-8). However, Owens does more than review a performance based on Bunyan’s narrative; he also analyzes omissions from and additions to Bunyan’s text in order to show how The Pilgrim’s Progress is appropriated in specific and subtle ways to accommodate the form and audience of the radio play. Identification and attribution are especially important in the essays by Arlette Zinck, Bob McKelvey, and Roger Pooley. In “Dating The Spiritual Warfare Broadsheet” (Recorder 13 [2007]: 3-4), which includes a copy of the broadsheet that has never been published before now, Zinck shows that The Spiritual Warfare in the Bruce Peel Special Collections at the University of Alberta was published in 1697, a reprint of a sheet published between 1642 and 1651. While this broadsheet could not have influenced Bunyan’s The Holy War (1682), the original might have, but more interestingly, the 1697 version could have been published to compete with or take advantage of the republication of The Holy War in 1696. In “Samuel Adams and the 1782 Edition of The Holy War” (Recorder 12 [2006]: 6-8), Bob McKelvey attributes the notes accompanying the first annotated edition of the text not to William Mason, who is often assumed to be the author, but to Samuel Adams, the leader of the Boston tea party and hero of the American Revolutionary War. In addition to identifying Adams as a plausible candidate for the authorship of the notes, however, McKelvey shows how influential Bunyan’s works were in the formative development of American culture and literature. Roger Pooley’s “The Earliest Illustrations of The Pilgrim’s Progress: Notes & Queries” (Recorder 6 [2000]: 10-15), a revised version of his Recorder piece, identifies verses that were originally associated with engravings illustrating early editions of The Pilgrim’s Progress but which became detached and incorporated into some editions of the allegory itself. At the same time, Pooley makes important claims in this essay about the authorship of the verses, the relationship between text and image in The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the canonicity of the illustrations. Threads based on Bunyan’s seventeenth-century influences and contexts can be seen in The Recorder from its inception, and that tradition is strongly represented in the essays in this collection. Kathy Brown, whom many of us met in 2004 at the Bedford Conference, is part of a long tradition of Bunyan enthusiasts, including Vera Britain and Albert Foster, who emphasize the influence of local geography on Bunyan’s imagination. In “The Pilgrim’s Path: Sources from Stevington” (Recorder 13 [2007]: 6-10), Brown suggests that the cross and Holy Well are two examples of prominent local landmarks that link Stevington and The Pilgrim’s Progress. Ralph Wood examines the link between the natural and supernatural in Bunyan’s theology in “The Providential and Scientific Seizures of Giant Despair” (Recorder 7 [2001]: 5-7). The Giant’s conniptions as he enters the light might be the result of Bunyan’s astute observation of what scientists now call “photosensitive epilepsy,” which often leads to seizures, grounding the allegory in carefully observed details of the natural world and the actions of Providence in it. And finally, the exchange between Galen Johnson and Richard Greaves illustrates what makes the Bunyan Society and The Recorder exceptional. The debate began with “Supra or Infra? Clarifying Bunyan’s Doctrine of Election” (Recorder 6 [2000]: 6-7), in which Johnson, with Michael Mullett, queries Greaves’s claim that Bunyan’s doctrine of predestination is infralapsarian. Johnson carefully unfolds Bunyan’s views within the context of Reformed theology, Bunyan’s own doctrinal statements, and the narrative of The Holy War. Greaves’s reply in “Bunyan’s Doctrine of Predestination: A Historical Perspective (Recorder 6 [2000]: 7-10) is clear, precise, and thorough, which is typical of the work of the most prolific and comprehensive scholar of British nonconformity and theology in the twentieth century. Precise definitions and distinctions are grounded in continental Reformed theology, its interpretation by British church leaders, and in Bunyan’s theological prose. Whatever we think about the “supra or infra” controversy, we cannot help but be impressed by two of the Bunyan Society’s members debating the central point of Bunyan’s theology thoughtfully and respectfully in The Recorder, where all members can benefit from their example and expertise. On a personal note, while this collection makes these essays more accessible and commemorates The Recorder’s role in the Bunyan community, it also gives me a chance to thank more formally members of the Bunyan Society for their service and scholarly collegiality. It has been a pleasure to work with past presidents Neil Keeble, Vera Camden, Tom Luxon, and Bob Owens as well as other members such as Stuart Sim, Isabel Hofmeyr, David Walker, Matt Horn, Maxine Hancock, Galen Johnson, Arlette Zinck, Bob Collmer, Roger Pooley, Aileen Ross, and Michael Davies. Special thanks are due to Shannon Murray, for her help with all aspects of The Recorder, and to David Gay, for his wise guidance of the Society. I would be “Forget-good,” however, if I failed to acknowledge James Forrest and Richard Greaves. I never met James Forrest, but I feel I know him through his students, and Richard Greaves’s generosity and dedication were clear to everyone who met him. They are both examples of the best that scholarly communities have to offer.

List of Contributors

Kathy Brown has a serious local interest in the life of John Bunyan. She lives just five miles from Bedford in Stevington, the home of one of the very early Baptist communities with which Bunyan was associated. Her garden at the Manor House, Stevington, on the site of the old hospitium visited by pilgrims, is open on certain Public Open Days (www.kathybrownsgarden.com).

Christopher E. Garrett is Assistant Professor of English and the Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Oklahoma City University. His research interests include seventeenth-century meditational prose, attribution studies, John Bunyan, and C. S. Lewis.

Richard Greaves, before his passing in 2004, was Lawton Distinguished Professor of History at Florida State University. Among many acclaimed publications were several devoted to Bunyan, including John Bunyan (1969), four volumes in the Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, and Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (2002), the culmination of his life-long scholarly interest in Bunyan and Nonconformity.

Galen K. Johnson is Associate Professor of Theology and Co- Director of Faculty Development at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. In addition to numerous journal articles, he has authored Prisoner of Conscience: John Bunyan on Self, Community, and Christian Faith (2003) and Historical Dictionary of the Puritans (2007).

Bob McKelvey received his Ph.D in Historical Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, PA, in 2004 and currently pastors the Westminster Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Windber, PA. His doctoral thesis, “Histories That Mansoul and Her Wars Anatomize: The Drama of Redemption in John Bunyan’s Holy War,” is scheduled for publication by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in their Reformed Historical Theology series.

Vincent Newey is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Leicester. His research interests fall mainly within the fields of Puritan literature, Romantic poetry and the Victorian novel. His recent publications include The Scriptures of Charles Dickens: Novels of Ideology, Novels of the Self (2004) and essays on Bunyan’s influence, William Cowper, and George Eliot.

W. R. Owens is Professor of English Literature at the Open University. He is Director of ‘The Reading Experience Database’ (www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED). His publications include editions of John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding (1987), and The Pilgrim’s Progress (2003). Jointly with P. N. Furbank, he is author of four books on Defoe and General Editor of The Works of Daniel Defoe (44 volumes, 2000-2009).

Roger Pooley teaches English in the School of Humanities, Keele University. He has recently edited The Pilgrim’s Progress for Penguin Classics (2008) and is the President of the International John Bunyan Society until 2010.

Ralph C. Wood is University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. His recent books include Contending for the Faith: The Church’s Engagement with Culture (Baylor, 2003); The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth (Westminster John Knox, 2004); Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans, 2004); and Literature and Theology (Abingdon, 2008).

Arlette Zinck is Dean of Arts at The King’s University College, Edmonton, Alberta. She currently serves as Treasurer for the Bunyan Society and has published a number of articles on Bunyan, including her most recent, “Reverend James Evans & the HBC: How a Cree Translation of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress May Shed New Light on an Old Scandal” (Annual Papers, Society of Church Historians, May 2008).

Note about the Text

In the main, each essay in this edition retains the original style of documentation used by its author. Consequently, surface details of parenthetical or note citation differ from piece to piece, and while some authors have elected to provide a separate Works Cited section, others have chosen to provide full bibliographic information in notes cross-referenced to the first instance the source is used in the text.

Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 1 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Dating The Spiritual Warfare Broadsheet

Arlette Zinck The King’s University College

The Spiritual Warfare broadsheet was purchased sometime before

1980 by the Bruce Peel Special Collections at the University of

Alberta for its potential relevance to the library’s Bunyan collection.

The bookseller who facilitated the library’s purchase of the broadsheet (the individual’s name is no longer known) speculated in his or her synopsis of the work that it might have been a source or inspiration for John Bunyan’s The Holy War. The work was tentatively dated to 1680, two years before the first edition of

Bunyan’s last allegory appeared. It is now possible to date this particular broadsheet to 1697. The sheet is a reprint of an earlier broadsheet that was originally produced in the heat of the Civil War, likely sometime between 1642 and 1651. Whether or not the original 2 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 version of this broadsheet may have influenced Bunyan is still a matter for speculation, but the reprinting of this broadsheet may indeed be connected with Bunyan’s work.

The Spiritual Warfare broadsheet (Fig. 1) depicts a castle surrounded by military regiments suited in the garb appropriate to

England’s Civil War period. In the centre of the castle yard is a solitary soldier at three times the scale of the characters positioned around him. Twelve Graces surround the solitary soldier, as well as a collection of seven battalions, each of which is labelled Couradge,

Hope, Faith, God’s Word, Bouldnes, Strength and Good Workes.

The figures of Time, Howers and Daies (drawn to the same scale as the solitary soldier) appear in triplicate, positioned outside of the castle walls, facing the satanic forces.

An enormous field full of enemy battalions and weaponry surrounds the castle on the outside. Here there are 24 groups, each labelled after vices. Immediately beneath them in the bottom centre of the image is the opulent tent of Satan himself. Satan, depicted here as the great dragon clothed in regal garb, is seated on a throne and holding a sword in his right hand and an orb in his left. He is flanked by five figures who are also wearing crowns and who bear the labels of five vices: Custome, Lust, Hypocrisie, Pride and Vainglori. Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 3 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Fig. 1: The Spiritual Warfare broadsheet, permission granted by Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta.

All of these characters are drawn in the same scale as the solitary

soldier and the figures of Time, Howers and Daies.

A poem exhorting readers to spiritual warfare frames the picture 4 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 on the top. Readers are challenged to recognize their ability to combat “hellish powers [that] besiege or batter” them if they, “like a

Christian soldier bold, shalt always be prepar’d/ In military wise to keep / A Fortified Guard.” The poem on the bottom of the page describes a scene wherein Satan gives instructions to his troops for the destruction of the castle and its virtues.

No definite date is assigned to the work, but the printer’s list of current publications available for sale, which follows the poetic text, provides several definite clues to the dating. The engraving of the spiritual war picture is credited to Martin Droeshout. Droeshout is most famous for his frontispiece engraving of Shakespeare’s portrait that appeared in the first folio of 1623. The Cotes brothers, printers located in Aldersgate, collaborated with Droeshout on the

Shakespeare engraving, and Richard Cotes, the one surviving Cotes

Brother, collaborated with Droeshout on The Spiritual Warfare broadsheet (the name of Richard Cotes appears alongside of

Droeshout’s in the credit line of the military drawing). Since

Droeshout’s last drawings are dated 1651, and since Richard Cotes took over the Cotes Brother’s business in 1642 when his brother

Thomas died, the broadsheet was most likely first published sometime between 1642 and 1651. These dates also place the Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 5 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 drawing within the Civil War era.

Although Cotes is most likely to have been the original printer of the work, the credits that follow the poetic text indicate that the broadsheet was also “printed and sold by John Garret” sometime later. A survey of the Term Catalogues confirms that John Garret frequently reprinted older works that appeared to him to have resale value. Garret was in business between 1676 and 1697. Preceding the note that says the broadsheet was printed for John Garret is the list of works that were also available for sale in his shop at the

Cornhill exchange. By matching the titles on offer in the printer’s list against the Term Catalogue descriptions of works available for sale by Garret, it is possible to date the reprinting of the broadsheet to

1697. This is also the year in which he published A New map of the

World in Divers Projections, which appears in the November 1697

Term Catalogue and is the third item listed for sale on the broadsheet. The remaining 9 titles that are advertised on the broadsheet appear in the Term Catalogues between 1675 to 1692, with one other entry dated 1676 and the rest falling between 1680 and 1688.

Why might the broadsheet have become suddenly popular again in 1697? The most logical answer is that John Bunyan’s The 6 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Holy War, the definite word on spiritual warfare by one of the most marketable authors ever, was republished by Nathaniel Ponder in

1696. The Holy War was originally published in 1682, and a spurious second edition full of irregularities emerged in 1684. Ponder’s edition of 1696 returned to the copy text used in 1682, thus making it the first official reprint of the authentic text. If Garret had an eye for choosing existing texts with great potential for resale, he may very well have seen a lucrative future for the broadsheet given the renewed interest in the topic of spiritual warfare that Bunyan’s book was likely to generate. It seems reasonable to assume that Garret might have hoped to ride on the coat tails of Bunyan’s epic to financial success of his own. Whether of not Garret succeeded with this plan, however, is a matter for speculation, but we do know that this piece is among the very last Garret produced before closing his business later this same year.

Works Cited

Arber, Edward, ed. The Term Catalogues. Volumes I, II, III. London:

n. pub., 1903.

Harrison, Brian, and Colin Matthew, eds. Oxford Dictionary of

National Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 7 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Plomer, Henry R. A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who

Were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland From 1668 to

1725. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1922.

8 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Supra or Infra? Clarifying Bunyan's Doctrine of Election

Galen Johnson Baylor University

In John Bunyan in Context (1996), Michael Mullett, Senior Lecturer in

History at Lancaster University, surveys nearly all of Bunyan’s works, tracing throughout them themes such as election, evangelism, conscience, and politics. Regarding Bunyan’s understanding of salvation, Mullett points out correctly that Bunyan’s doctrine was quite indebted to Luther, rejecting the notion that sanctification in any way completes one’s justification and embracing salvation by grace alone through faith. Moreover, Mullett deduces from this, primarily based on his reading of A Confession of My Faith (1672), that Bunyan “adopts a ‘supra-lapsarian’ exposition of election, God’s choice being determined before the Creation and the Fall, though centering utterly on Christ, without whom there was neither election, grace nor Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 9 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 salvation” (Mullett 177). The qualifier of Mullett’s sentence is a standard addition to explanations of early Reformed soteriology made necessary after Karl Barth, who claimed that Calvin’s system of predestination made Christ the executor of the divine decrees but not the Lord over them. But the claim that Bunyan was a “supralapsarian” contradicts Richard Greaves’s John Bunyan, the starting point for any study of Bunyan’s theology over the last thirty years. Greaves writes, also referring to A Confession, that “according to Bunyan election occurred prior to the actual creation of man, God having foreseen that man would sin and thus merit eternal damnation. Consequently, election was subsequent to God’s foreknowledge of the Fall, but prior to the fall itself. Bunyan was thus an infralapsarian” (Greaves 52).

Obviously, either Mullett or Greaves has misunderstood Bunyan.

The stakes for Bunyan, who cut his doctrinal teeth on defending his Reformed notions of Christ and salvation against the Quakers and other radicals, were much more than the vindication of his linguistic and theological talents. According to the two formulations, the conflict was between defending divine omniscience and omnipotence

(supralapsarian: God ordained the elect before the fall) or emphasizing divine love and justice (infralapsarian: God ordained the elect after the fall, since it would be unjust to condemn human beings 10 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 even before sin entered the world) (Harvey 187). In holding the elective decrees until after the Fall—or, more precisely, after foreknowledge of the Fall—the infralapsarians, in the opinion of their opponents, made divine freedom dependent upon human activity, which was thought to be a concession to Arminianism. Mullett holds that Bunyan thought God’s choice to be prior to the “thought” of any human action, entailing that the Fall was actually a necessary part of the working out of God’s plan for redemption. Greaves, on the other hand, believes that Bunyan allowed for God’s foreknowledge of human sin to come before the decision of election in the order of salvation.

Clearly, in A Confession of My Faith, Bunyan rules out any idea that God waited until the fall occurred to declare who was elect: “I believe, that this decree, choice or election, was before the foundation of the world; and so before the elect themselves, had being in themselves” (Whole Works 1.598). So did God base the elective decrees upon foreknowledge of the Fall? Bunyan rejects the offering of some Arminians that election was based upon the foreknowledge of those who freely choose to accept and live according to the gospel: “I believe, that the decree of election is so far from making works in us foreseen, the ground or cause of the Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 11 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 choice” (598). This could be taken as leaning toward the supralapsarian position that God considered nothing about human beings—not even their existence—before opting indiscriminately for particular individuals to be saved. Bunyan’s statement that God

“made his choice before the world was” would then mean that God chose without reference to the world at all, which would include, of course, the events of Eden. “God,” Bunyan says, “stays not for the being of things, to determine his eternal purpose by” (598).

Supporting evidence for this reading can be found in The

Saints’ Privilege and Profit, one of the posthumously published works of 1692. There, Bunyan can be referring only to the effects of the Fall when he says that “grace signifies that God still acts . . . as a free agent, not being wrought upon by the misery of the creature, as a procuring cause [my italics]; but of his own princely mind” (Whole

Works 1.644). Nor should one imagine that the decision of the

Father-King in The Holy War (1682) to send his son to reclaim

Mansoul was made subsequent to Mansoul’s fall, as is true in Milton’s

Paradise Lost. God’s words to Emmanuel indicate that he was far from being caught off guard by the temporary victory of Diabolus:

“Thou knowest, as I do myself, the condition of the town of Mansoul, and what we have purposed, and what thou hast done to redeem it” 12 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

(Whole Works 3.284). For Bunyan, God’s purpose of redemption and

Emmanuel’s coming to earth are prior to the fall of Mansoul, which appears chronologically to precipitate them.

One may, therefore, conclude that while Greaves’s stature in all things Bunyan remains ever secure, it is Mullett who reads Bunyan correctly here. To safeguard against any conception that humans participate in salvation, Bunyan apparently allowed not even their post-fallen need for salvation to have been a divine consideration.

Works Cited

Greaves, Richard L. John Bunyan. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969.

Harvey, Van A. A Handbook of Theological Terms. New York: Collier

Books, 1964.

Mullett, Michael A. John Bunyan in Context. Keele: Keele UP, 1996.

The Whole Works of John Bunyan. Ed. George Offor. 3 Volumes.

Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1977.

Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 13 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Bunyan’s Doctrine of Predestination: A Historical Perspective

Richard L. Greaves (1938-2004) Florida State University

To assess Bunyan’s position concerning the enigmatic doctrine of predestination, we need a clear understanding of the terms and a grasp of the historical background. The definitions of supralapsarian

(“God ordained the elect before the fall”) and infralapsarian (“God ordained the elect after the fall”) proposed by Galen Johnson are erroneous, though the same error appears in one of the more venerable reference sources, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian

Church (1552, 1560). In fact, this definition does not reflect the two fundamental positions debated among early modern Reformed thinkers. Following Ephesians 4:1, all Reformed theologians contended that predestination preceded the creation and the fall. The debate concerned the order of the divine decrees, conceived 14 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 conceptually rather than temporally inasmuch as God is beyond the bounds of time. Supralapsarians argued that the decree to predestine preceded the decree to permit (or effect) the fall, whereas infralapsarians reversed the order. As the debate progressed in the seventeenth century, it came to focus on how God perceived humanity when he promulgated the decrees of election and reprobation, namely, whether he thought of a human person “as a being to be created and liable to fall (creabilis et labilis) or as a being already created and fallen (creatus et lapsus)” (Muller 81).

Historians of theology assign Theodore Beza a key role in the development of the supralapsarian position, though recognizing that he was a transitional figure between John Calvin and the “scholastic” authors of the seventeenth century, such as Francis Gomarus (Bray

142; Muller 96). Beza stressed the primacy of God’s unsearchable ways and hidden will, which predestined some people “from everlasting” to salvation as a manifestation of divine glory and mercy, and refused saving grace to others, also “from everlasting.” The fall then became the necessary means for the predestinarian decrees to function. According to Beza, Adam chose to sin, but his decision accorded with God’s decree that humanity fall; in this manner Beza endeavored to avoid the seemingly logical conclusion that God Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 15 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 decreed sin (Beza, diagram; Bray 98-100; Muller 80, 86-88).

Across the Channel, William Perkins wrestled with these issues but failed to establish a consistent doctrine. On the one hand he argued for a supralapsarian position: “The decree of reprobation is a worke of Gods providence, whereby he hath decreed to passe by certaine men . . . for the manifestation of his justice and wrath in their due destruction: or, it is his will, whereby he suffereth some men to fall into sinne” (in Muller 168). On the other hand, Perkins articulated an infralapsarian interpretation when he contended that “God doth take certaine men which are to be created, unto his everlasting love and favour, passing by the rest, and by taking maketh them vessels of mercy and honour” (in Muller 165). If such apparent inconsistency exists in the work of Perkins, who studied at Christ’s College,

Cambridge, where he was subsequently a fellow, we should be alert to the possibility of discrepancies in Bunyan’s work. At a deeper level, the inconsistencies may reflect varying perspectives from which an author approaches predestination. When Peter Martyr Vermigli analyzed the causes of predestination, he stressed the primacy of the divine will, which led him to espouse a supralapsarian position, but when his focus was the temporal rather than the eternal, his

Christological orientation resulted in his assertion of an infralapsarian 16 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 interpretation (James 88-89).

At the Synod of Dort the British delegation espoused an infralapsarian view, but English Protestants were divided on the issue in the seventeenth century. Among the leading proponents of the two fundamental views were William Twisse, who championed the supralapsarian position, and Richard Sibbes, an infralapsarian (White

184-85, 263, 290; Wallace 81). Bunyan’s friend John Owen softened what Dewey Wallace has called “the excesses of supralapsarianism” by his Christocentrism (150). Indeed, any attempt to assess the totality of Bunyan’s writings must underscore his own prevalent

Christocentrism. Bunyan’s primary interest was in the soteriological ramifications of predestination, not the more formal theological issues that are at the heart of the supralapsarian-infralapsarian debate.

Consequently, to comb Bunyan’s writings for hints about his views on a debate of which he was probably not cognizant risks the distortion of his thought.

Before analyzing the one relatively formal statement Bunyan made on the order of the decrees, we can dismiss Michael Mullett’s assertion that Bunyan was a supralapsarian because it rests on the erroneous definition noted at the outset of this essay. So too does

Johnson’s reference to The Holy War. As he notes, God’s decision to Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 17 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 send Emanuel to redeem Mansoul preceded the latter’s fall, but this is consistent with both the supralapsarian and the infralapsarian interpretations. The point at issue is the conceptual order of the decrees, not whether one of them occurred after the fall itself.

Bunyan addressed this subject at the very beginning of his first book, Some Gospel-Truths Opened According to the Scriptures.

Citing Ephesians 1:4, he espoused an unmistakably infralapsarian interpretation, making the decree of predestination conceptually and temporally subsequent to the decision to permit or order the fall.

“God in his own wisedom and counsel, knowing what would come to passe, as if it were already done, Rom. 4. 17. he knowing that man would break his commandements, and so throw himselfe under eternal destruction, did in his own purpose fore-ordain such a thing as the rise of him that should fall, and that by a Saviour, Eph. 1. 4.” To make certain his readers did not misunderstand him, Bunyan immediately reiterated this point: “God seeing that we would transgress, and break his commandement, did before chuse some of those that would fall, and give them to him that should afterward purchase them actually, though in the account of God his blood was shed before the world was” (MW 1.30). The order of the decrees is thus clearly demarcated, commencing with the determination to allow 18 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 or order the fall, subsequent to which come the decree of predestination and then the covenant between the Father and the

Son that called for the latter to sacrifice himself in order to justify the elect (MW 1.31-32).

Although Bunyan was not a systematic theologian, he articulated his doctrine of predestination with care in A Confession of

My Faith. Johnson mistakenly finds evidence of the supralapsarian position in Bunyan’s assertion that “the decree of election is so far off, from making works in us foreseen, the ground or cause of the choyce

. . .” (MW 4.146). He omits the rest of Bunyan’s sentence: “that it containeth in the bowels of it, not onely the persons, but the graces that accompany their salvation.” By quoting only part of the statement

Johnson has missed Bunyan’s point, shared by all Reformed thinkers, that election is solely grounded in divine grace, not human effort. Bunyan’s concern is not with the order of the decrees but with soteriology, specifically the unacceptability of human works in salvation; divine foreknowledge of such efforts cannot be the basis of election because the latter rests exclusively on grace. Once again quoting Bunyan selectively, Johnson misreads him: according to

Johnson, “Bunyan’s statement that God ‘made his choice before the world was’ would then mean that God chose without reference to the Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 19 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 world at all, which would include, of course, the events of Eden.” But here is what Bunyan actually says: “For God who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were, stayes not for the being of things, to determine his eternal purpose by; but having all things present to, and in his wisdome, he made his choice before the world was” (MW 4.145-46). “Having all things present,” God promulgated the decrees, and it is therefore not the case that “God chose without reference to the world at all.”

Johnson also cites a passage from The Saints Privilege and

Profit that underscores God’s freedom of action in choosing to bestow grace on the elect. Again, the context is crucial, for Bunyan is not discussing the conceptual order of the decrees of predestination and the fall but the Reformed doctrine of divine sovereignty (MW 13.168).

As Bunyan reiterates this theme two paragraphs later, he explains

“that God by all that he doth towards us in saving and forgiving, acts freely as the highest Lord and of his own good will and pleasure”

(13.169). In this work Bunyan is recapitulating a fundamental point he made in his controversy with Edward Fowler, namely, that people can do nothing, not even strive for holiness, “that the decree of

Election should respect as a thing fore-seen of God, to prevail with him to predestinate” them to eternal life (MW 4.105). Nor is the 20 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 misery of the human condition “a procuring cause” of grace, for this would imply a diminution of divine freedom, as if something beyond

God could compel him to act. As Bunyan makes clear at the outset of the paragraph in question, God, in his sovereignty, by grace freely

“acteth in Christ towards his People” (MW 13.168). Elsewhere

Bunyan explains that this action is based on the covenant between

Father and Son made “in eternity about the Salvation of sinners in time,” an undertaking of sovereign grace, yet clearly subsequent to the decree permitting the fall (MW 8.199; cf. 1.31-32).

The evidence we have indicates that Bunyan, like most

Calvinists, held an infralapsarian position, though he may not have been aware of the debate. His fundamental interest in predestination was soteriological, and his writing on this subject was overwhelmingly

Christocentric. As he expressed this point in his Confession, “I believe that Christ Jesus is he in whom the elect are alwayes considered, and that without him there is neither election, Grace, nor salvation” (MW 4.146).

Works Cited

Beza, Theodore. The Treasure of Truth. London, 1576.

Bray, John S. Theodore Beza’s Doctrine of Predestination. Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 21 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1975.

Cross, F. L., ed. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. 3rd

ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

James, Frank A., III. Peter Martyr Vermigli and Predestination: The

Augustinian Inheritance of an Italian Reformer. Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1998.

The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan. Ed. Roger Sharrock. 13

vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975-94.

Muller, Richard A. Christ and the Decree: Christology and

Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins.

Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1986.

Wallace, Dewey D., Jr. Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English

Protestant Theology,1525-1695. Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press, 1982.

White, Peter. Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and

Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the

Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

22 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Samuel Adams and the 1782 Edition of The Holy War

Bob McKelvey John Wycliffe Theological College Johannesburg, RSA

The first annotated edition of The Holy War appeared in 1782 with notes and a preface usually attributed to William Mason (1719-1791).

The author of this ancillary material never specifically identifies himself, and this may account for the common assumption that the notes were written by Mason. The title of the 1782 edition simply claims that the notes are the same type as those added by William

Mason to the Alexander Hogg edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress.1 This

1 John Bunyan, The Holy War: made by Shaddai upon Diabolus, for the regaining of the metropolis of the world, or, the losing and taking again of the town of Mansoul. / By Mr. John Bunyan: An entire new and correct edition, illustrated with notes explanatory, experimental, and practical, in the same Manner as those lately added to The Pilgrim’s Progress, by W. Mason (London: Alex. Hogg, Vallance and Conder, 1782). A recent example, in which Mason is incorrectly Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 23 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

text of The Holy War was later included in The Whole Works of . . .

John Bunyan, with the set revised and corrected by William Mason and published by Hogg in 1784.2 However, evidence shows that

Samuel Adams may be the annotator. In the Oxford edition of The

Holy War (1980), Roger Sharrock and James Forrest recognized at least the involvement of Adams in the 1782 version when they called it “the first annotated edition by W. Mason (1782) to which Samuel

Adams (according to the B. M. Catalogue) contributed explanatory and hortatory notes.”3 This statement supports the supposition that

Adams contributed the notes to the set edited by Mason in 1782.

Subsequent editions of this annotated The Holy War settle the

cited as the author of the notes, occurs in The Holy War, . . . By John Bunyan, Author of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” etc., with explanatory notes by Mason (Choteau, MT: Old Paths Gospel Press, n.d.). Beth Lynch makes the same mistake in “‘Rather Dark to Readers in General’: Some Critical Casualties of John Bunyan’s Holy War (1682),” Bunyan Studies 9 (1999/2000): 30.

2 The whole works of that eminent servant of Christ, the late reverend and much esteemed Mr. John Bunyan : formerly minister of the Gospel and pastor of a congregation at Bedford : including the whole of his pieces, sermons, discourses, tracts, and other writings on various divine subjects ... / John Bunyan ; the whole carefully revised and corrected by Mr. William Mason and others ; with a recommendatory preface by the Rev. Mr. John Ryland. [title online] (London: Printed for the proprietors and published by Alex Hogg at the King's-Arms [1784]), accessed 8 August 2003; available from http:// hollis.harvard.edu. 3 See, “Note on the Text,” in The Holy War made by Shaddai upon Diabolus for the Regaining the Metropolis of the World, ed. Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), xlvii. 24 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

matter without dispute. A 1795 edition of The Holy War includes in its

title, Notes explanatory, experimental, and practical, . . . by an able

friend of the Gospel. Recommended by Mr. William Mason and Mr.

John Ryland. In the advertisement to the reader, William Mason attested, “having with much pleasure perused Mr. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s

Progress, I took the liberty, being solicited, to write occasional notes upon it. His Holy War has since been republished; the notes on which

(by another hand) as they appear to me to be most consistent with the design of the author, and agreeable to faith and sound doctrine.”4

Given Mason’s death in 1791, this is obviously a recommendation of

an earlier edition. The mention “by another hand” is significant,

because it may indicate an attempt to clear up confusion about the

notes. Adams chose for whatever reason to remain anonymous.5

4 See “Advertisement to the Reader,” in The Holy War made by King Shaddai upon Diabolus for the regaining of the metropolis of the world; or, the losing and taking again of the town of Mansoul. By Mr. John Bunyan, minister of the Gospel and Pastor of the congregation at Bedford. Entire new and complete edition illustrated with notes, explanatory, experimental, and practical (the same manner as those added to the Pilgrim’s Progress) by an able friend of the Gospel. Recommended by Mr. William Mason and Mr. John Ryland (London: Murgatroyd, 1795).

5 American National Biography, s.v. “Adams, Samuel (27 Sept. 1722 – 2 Oct. 1803),” by Pauline Maier; John K. Alexander, Samuel Adams: America’s Revolutionary Politician (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 176-77; William M. Fowler, Samuel Adams: Radical Puritan (New York: Longman, 1997), 4-7, 16-19, 27-29; John C. Miller, Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1936), 6-7; James K. Hosmer, Samuel Adams (New York: Chelsea Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 25 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

The anonymity finally disappeared in another 1795 edition of The

Holy War containing the same pagination and notes with the title, The

Holy War, . . . A new edition, to which are subjoined notes by Samuel

Adams.6 We can conclude that Adams provided the 1782 notes

based on the fact that the note content and pagination of this edition

are identical to the 1795 edition apart from some minor changes in

wording.

The question still remains as to whether we can pinpoint exactly

which Samuel Adams is the author. For example, neither the British

Museum catalogue nor the 1795 Holy War editions grant any specific

biographical information for the name “Samuel Adams.” Still, the

Samuel Adams of American Revolutionary fame (1722-1803)

presents himself as a viable candidate. Of the biographers I

surveyed, none mentioned Adams as the author of the notes. Yet the

House, 1980), 15; William V. Wells, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, 3 vols. (Freeport, New York, 1888; reprint, 1969), 3.446-47. 6 The Holy War, made by King Shaddai upon Diabolus for the regaining of the metropolis of the world; or, the losing and taking again of the town of Mansoul. Written by John Bunyan. A new edition, to which are subjoined notes by Samuel Adams (London: Printed for the proprietors, 1795). Mason’s notes appeared in John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from this world to that which is to come: delivered under the similitude of a dream: wherein are discovered the manner of his setting out, his dangerous journey, and safe arrival at the desired country: complete in two parts. An entire new and complete edition . . . Part I. To which are now added, notes, explanatory, experimental and practical by Mr. William Mason (London: Printed for Alex. Hogg, 1778). 26 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 details of Adams’s life fit fairly well with such an authorship. First, the original anonymity corresponds with this Adams, since he was known for his humility. Second, before entering politics, he trained for the ministry at Harvard College (graduating in 1740) where he was schooled in Calvinistic-covenantal theology. This would account for the theological knowledge evident in the notes. Other circumstantial evidence points to him as the most likely annotator: his connection to the Puritan Mather family; his advocacy of family piety; his appeals to

God during wartime; his Whiggish opposition to what he saw as the tyranny of English rule; his interaction with Puritan literature; the impact of the First Great Awakening on his life, especially Jonathan

Edwards’s Life of David Brainerd; and his nicknames, “the last of the

Puritans” and the “Cromwell of New England.”

In his preface for the 1782 edition, Adams gave an indication of

The Holy War’s popularity in the eighteenth century when he claimed,

“It might be justly deemed impertinent and absurd, here, to endeavor to bestow any encomium on Mr. Bunyan’s Holy War, the merit of which (as well as of his Pilgrim’s Progress) is so generally acknowledged by persons of every denomination.” In a similar manner, Adams later testified, “Perhaps no human compositions have been more generally received, nor more highly esteemed, than Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 27 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

the Holy War and Pilgrim’s Progress.” Adams noted that because

much of the allegory is “rather dark to readers in general, who cannot

be expected to spare much time in removing the difficulties,” he

provided faithful explanation so readers might “attend more closely to

and understand more clearly, the doctrinal, moral, practical, and

experimental design of the pious and familiarly entertaining author.”7

The notes also point to the theological training received by

Adams at Harvard. Many are of doctrinal and redemptive-historical import and are Calvinistic in character.8 Still, Adams focused the

majority of his attention on the progress of salvation in the individual

from the states of depravity, regeneration, justification, sanctification,

7 [Samuel Adams], “Preface by the author of the notes,” in The Holy War (1782), iii-iv. 8 For example, Adams made reference to the loss of free will; the appointment of salvation by a sovereign and gracious decree; the mediatorial work of Christ as prophet, priest, and king; effectual calling; the participation of the Triune Godhead in salvation; the justice of God in condemning sinners; the promise of salvation to the elect in Genesis 3:15; the universal offer of the gospel held in conjunction with unconditional election; the ongoing malice of Satan; the perseverance of Christians; the ongoing slander of ministers of the gospel; the day of righteous judgment of the quick and the dead; and the gracious perfecting of the church, “the spiritual building in glory.” See Bunyan’s The Holy War, . . . A new edition, to which are subjoined notes by Samuel Adams (London, 1795), pp. 7, 16, 20, 25, 27, 29, 35, 37, 50, 76, 77, 82, 87, 95, 101, 104, 109, 110, 112, 113, 121, 134, 157, 176, 183, 190, 192, 301, 324, 325, 330, 332, 337-38. With these findings in mind, Beth Lynch goes too far in asserting that the “running notes” of Mason [Adams] in The Holy War “effortlessly circumvent its less palatable soteriological overtones” as if Adams was promoting his own agenda and downplaying the theological significance of the work (“Rather Dark” 30). Lynch here makes this assertion without validation. 28 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 perseverance and glorification. For him, the most significant value of

The Holy War was in the benefit it provided for the individual Christian life.9 The Revolutionary involvement of Adams makes the absence of political comments perplexing to the point that it casts some doubt on his authorship of the notes. For example, he obtained his master’s degree in 1743 with a thesis upholding the legality of resisting the magistrate while maintaining a non-aggressive stance in the advocacy of force. This would explain an attraction to the political allusions possibly recognized by Adams in The Holy War, but it does not seem to fit the composition of notes that were solely theological.

Are there any possible solutions to this dilemma? It is not without question that only a hundred years after the writing of The Holy War,

Adams failed to recognize the political agenda in the allegory. It is also possible that even if the political allusions were known, they were excluded because the theological themes were seen to be more important. In the end, while some questions remain unanswered, it is reasonable to view Samuel Adams (1722-1803) not only as the leader of the 1773 Boston Tea Party but also as the annotator of the

1782 Holy War.

9 [Samuel Adams], “Preface,” iii-iv. Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 29 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

The Earliest Illustrations of The Pilgrim’s Progress: Notes & Queries

Roger Pooley Keele University

This begins with a story. Some years ago, the late John R. Knott Jr. was approached by Everyman with a view to a new paperback edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress and Grace Abounding. The proposal was to keep an old text, but to add a new introduction and notes. Professor

Knott noticed something odd about this text, in particular some verses inserted into the narrative which he did not recognise, and politely declined the offer. I saw the letter and the invitation, and took the view that if John Knott was suspicious, so should I be; and not long afterwards Everyman was swallowed up in a takeover, and the paperback series is no more. The question of the verses stayed with me, though, and eventually, while searching through early editions in 30 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 preparation for the Penguin Classics edition, I discovered where the verses came from. They were attached to some of the earliest illustrations of the First Part, and they had simply got detached from them when publishers no longer reproduced the engravings they were meant to explain. An edition by George Offor published by

Routledge in 1856, illustrated by John Gilbert, simply titles the illustrations, for example, ‘Evangelist directs Christian to the Wicket gate’, and then tucks the verse that was written for the seventeenth- century engraving (it begins ‘Christian no sooner leaves the World but meets/ Evangelist...’) into the text on the page facing (p. 41). John

Brown’s 1887 edition, published by Hodder & Stoughton, has no illustrations old or new, but it keeps many of these extra verses as footnotes in the appropriate place (See p. 24).

When did these verses first appear? In the fifth edition of The

Pilgrim’s Progress, published in 1680, the following Advertisement appears:

The Pilgrims Progress having found good Acceptation among the People, to the carrying off the Fourth Impression, which had many Additions, more than any preceding: And the Publisher observing that many persons desired to have it illustrated with Pictures, hath endeavoured to gratifie them therein: And Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 31 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

besides those that are ordinarily printed to this Fifth Impression, hath provided Thirteen Copper Cutts curiously Engraven for such as desire them.10

Sure enough, some surviving copies of the fifth edition of 1680 have these copper cuts laid in—they were clearly sold separately. These are not the first illustrations to the book to be published: the third edition has the ‘sleeping portrait’, engraved by Robert White, and the fourth edition has, in addition, one woodcut, illustrating the martyrdom of Faithful, on page 128, with a verse quatrain beneath it.

The illustrations themselves are of sigular importance. They inaugurate a rich tradition of illustrating The Pilgrim’s Progress which continues to the present day. They offer a way of visualising key moments of the text. At the same time, they establish that text in a tradition of Protestant iconography, represented by the illustrations to

Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, a text of great importance to Bunyan.

They mark and encourage the expansion of the readership of the book. They signal its reception among children, after Bunyan himself had published one of the first ‘children’s books’. They form part of an

10 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. J. B. Wharey, 2nd ed. rev. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp. li-liii. Subsequent references are marked in the text as PP. 32 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

attempt to move the book up market in the early eighteenth century,

and they follow the cultural export and translation of the text and

contribute to its multiple acculturations.11

The illustrations are accompanied by verses, and we need to

ask why. It is tempting to answer that they are part of a Protestant

anxiety about the image; that they are there to textually fix what might

otherwise be a more open, polysemic addition to Bunyan’s book.

Without the verses, such an argument would go, they would be like

having all the images in the House of the Interpreter without the

interpretations. Christian’s progress, it has often been remarked, is a

constantly interpreted progress.12

11 Much of this has been explored by Nathalie Colle-Bak in her 2002 Universite Nancy 2 doctoral thesis and in ‘The Role of Illustrations in the Reception of The Pilgrim’s Progress’ in W. R. Owens and Stuart Sim, eds. Reception, Appropriation, Recollection: Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007); for the relation of the illustrations to reception in Africa, see chapter 8 of Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004); see also the pioneering article by Frank Mott Harrison, ‘Some Illustrators of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part One’, The Library 3 (1936): 241-63.

12 See Valentine Cunningham, ‘Glossing and Glozing: Bunyan and Allegory’, in John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus, ed. N. H. Keeble (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); and, at more length, Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Michael Davies, Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. chapters 4 and 5. Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 33 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Illustrations might also, by definition, be regarded as subordinate to the text they illustrate, although, as with musical settings, they have another kind of power which might render a contest uneven. The theory of illustration that has emerged from the study of nineteenth-century novels, Dickens in particular, is divided on this. But then, so were the novelists themselves. For Mark Twain,

A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture. In Rome, people with fine sympathetic natures stand up and weep in front of the celebrated ‘Beatrice Cenci the Day of her Execution’. It shows what a label can do. If they did not know the picture, they would inspect it unmoved, and say, ‘Young Girl with Hay Fever’; ‘Young Girl with her Head in a Bag’.13

Running counter to Twain’s confidence in the ascendency of word over picture is some authors’ wariness of illustration. As Hillis

Miller points out, both Mallarmé and Henry James recognise with suspicion the power of the visual, and as a result Mallarmé rejects illustration altogether, and James ‘fears the alien power of illustration’,

13 Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, ed. Harold Beaver (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 291. 34 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 only to accede to the photographs of Alvin Langdon Coburn accompanying the New York edition of his novels, as long as they did not refer to particular scenes in the novels.14 That distinguishes him from Dickens, who often worked closely with his illustrators such as

Phiz; and one of them, George Cruikshank, also engraved a notable interpretation of Bunyan’s Vanity Fair.

In this period, particularly with a ‘Puritan’ author, we might be tempted to see the issue of whether to illustrate or not as part of the

Protestant/Catholic divide. However, just as the emblem book tradition is common to both, so is the illustration with explanatory verses. For example, the few illustrations of Richard Crashaw’s poems are no more free-standing, and no more, or less, open to interpretation than Bunyan’s. Consider, for example, the emblem at the beginning of Richard Crashaw’s Carmen Deo Nostro, published in

Paris in 1652. It depicts a heart locked with a clasp and a combination lock, with the verse below:

‘Tis not the work of force but skill

To find the way into man’s will.

14 J. Hillis Miller, Illustration (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), pp. 62-75.

Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 35 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

‘Tis love alone can hearts unlock.

Who knowes the WORD, he needs not lock.15

Crashaw was a high church Anglican poet and priest who had converted to Catholicism in 1646: we see that the emblematic picture, interpretively fixed by a four-line verse, is not wholly a Puritan or

Protestant phenomenon.

Let us look more closely at some examples from The Pilgrim’s

Progress, and we will begin with the very first one to be published after the Dreamer portrait: the martyrdom of Faithful (See Fig. 1).

The burning at the stake image is familiar from Foxe’s Acts and

Monuments.16 However, the elaborate headdresses of the spectators, along with the curves in the spears, have something of contemporary depictions of the Turk about them. No speech bubbles, either, or speech banners, as John Day, Foxe’s publisher, would sometimes add. The swirls of smoke rising from the bonfire spiral into

15 The Poems English Latin and Greek of Richard Crashaw, ed. L. C. Martin, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 236. 16 For a discussion of the engravers of the sixteenth-century editions of Foxe, see ch. 2 of Edward Hodnett, Image and Text (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1982). As he notes on pp. 32-4, there are generic ‘utility blocks’ representing, in one instance, seventeen different burnings with the same image. 36 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 the top right of the block, where a chariot in the clouds, in the manner of the death and apotheosis of Elijah in 2 Kings 2:11, takes Faithful off to heaven.

Fig. 1: The Martyrdom of Faithful. Reprinted with permission from New York Public Library.

In the body of the text, Christian escapes and sings a song Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 37 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 about Faithful just before he meets Hopeful:

Well Faithful, thou hast faithfully profest

Unto thy Lord: with him thou shalt be blest;

When Faithless ones, with all their vain delights,

Are crying out under their hellish plights.

Sing, Faithful, sing; and let thy name survive;

For though they kill’d thee, thou art yet alive. (PP 97-8)

The parallels between the two poems are striking. The sentiments of the opening and closing lines are comparable; the middle of the verses contrast Faithful with either the faithless ones, in Christian’s song, or with the law-court, in the illustration verse. In Christian’s song there is a play on ‘Faithful’ and ‘faithfully’; in the illustration verse, on ‘brave’ and ‘bravely’. They are both in rather rough heroic couplets, with a similar mixture of endstopping and running on; technically, there is not much to choose between them. The verses function in very similar ways as memorials to Faithful, and as celebrations of his victory in the perspective of eternity. In the 10th edition of 1685 you can even see them on the same page opening.

Whoever wrote the verses to the illustration must have been 38 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 consciously reworking the verse in the main text.

Whether it was Bunyan or some hack paid to run up something to go below the cuts is difficult to determine. Ponder does not publish poetry, apart from Bunyan’s. There have been great advances in statistical authorship studies recently, especially for the Restoration period, but the sample is a little small to be sure, especially if there is not plausible alternative candidate. One could be rude and say they are bad enough, but Bunyan’s patchiness as a poet can include some quite inspired moments by the 1680s. One can say who they are not by. A few lines of Benjamin Keach, the Bedford Baptist, will soon convince you that it’s not him, for example. And who is the artist of the cuts? The later woodcuts seem too crude to be by Robert White, the only artistic name securely associated with The Pilgrim’s

Progress, but they could be from his workshop. John Sturt, an apprentice of White’s, who engraved a revision of White’s ‘sleeping portrait’ for the Second Part, is one candidate. Sturt later engraved a set of illustrations for the first quarto edition in the early eighteenth century which signalled a move up market after the increasingly cheap versions of The Pilgrim’s Progress at the end of the seventeenth century.

The earliest complete set of these cuts, however, is not British Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 39 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 at all but Dutch, and engravings rather than woodcuts. They survive in the New York Public Library, originally from the Lenox Library, in a

1680 fifth edition. I was grateful to be able to reproduce them in my

Penguin Classics edition (2008). The spelling of some of the engraved poems includes obviously Dutch misspellings and a fair sprinkling of umlauts, which is the major clue. Dutch engraving was, at that time, as good as anywhere in Europe, and there was a close relationship between radical nonconformist Christians in the

Netherlands and England. Furthermore, there was a strong Dutch tradition of emblem book making which, as Svetlana Alpers argues,

‘displays the same easy relationship between word and image that

[is] found in Dutch paintings.’17

One important feature of the illustrations with poems from the fifth edition onward is that they and the poems, in their four-line stanzas, correspond to episodes in the text that are already commented on in verse. Graham Midgley in his edition of Bunyan’s poems likens these poems in the body of the text to curtain verses in drama. Functionally he has a point, but generically there may be more to say. Quite often I think they have affinities with the Divine

17 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (London: Penguin Books, 1989), p. 231. 40 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Ejaculation, ‘a short fervent prayer’ (iacula is an arrow: the definition is from the 1656 edition of Bulloker’s dictionary). Elizabeth Clarke discusses the term interestingly as a problem in gendered reading of seventeenth-century poetry, but also comments that ‘the appeal of

Augustinian ejaculation is that it offers the cessation of sinful human rhetoric, and its replacement with divine utterance’.18 Such a sidestepping of worldly wisdom would have an appeal for Bunyan, as it does for Herbert and any number of ‘minor’ poets that Clarke describes, and, sure enough, the text has plenty of them – ‘What shall I do?’, to start with. In poetry, most obviously, after Christian loses his burden at the Cross, he sings

Thus far did I come loaden with my sin,

Nor could ought ease the grief that I was in,

Till I came hither: What a place is this!

Must here be the beginning of thy bliss? (PP 38)

Revealingly the marginal note remarks, ‘A Christian can sing tho alone, when God doth give him the joy of his heart’.

18 Elizabeth Clarke, ‘The Gendering of the Religious Lyric in the Interregnum’, in ‘This Double Voice’: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Danielle Clarke & Elizabeth Clarke (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 208-29. Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 41 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

The pattern of ejaculation and praise is comparable in the

Apollyon episode, though there the inspired ejaculations during the battle (Rejoyce not against me, O mine Enemy! and Nay, in all these things we are more than Conquerours) are actually biblical quotations, and so incontrovertibly inspired. The poem at the end is a much more conscious Te Deum: ‘I will here give thanks to him that hath delivered me out of the mouth of the Lion’, and embarks on a neatly constructed set of four couplets on what happened with a climactic couplet of praise.

Great Beelzebub, the Captain of this Fiend,

Design’d my ruin; therefore to this end

He sent him harnest out, and he with rage

That hellish was, did fiercely me Ingage:

But blessed Michael helped me, and I

By dint of Sword did quickly make him flye;

Therefore to him let me give lasting praise,

And thank and bless his holy name always. (PP 60)

Now, both of these episodes are also prime candidates for illustration.

What is striking about the verses that go with them is the distance. In 42 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 the text, Bunyan lets Christian sing, emote, comment and interpret; in the verses to the illustrations, there is an author (if not the author) commenting on the situation. The almost jaunty tone of the question and answer, a paraphrase of scripture in line 2, a secular proverb in line 4 – it’s a very Bunyanesque mixture, although it adds to the tonal problematics of the Cross episode.19

Who’s this? The Pilgrim. How! ‘tis very true,

Old things are past away, all’s become new.

Strange! He’s another Man upon my word,

They be fine Feathers that make a fine Bird.

I don’t think that last line is meant to be ironic – how could it be? But normally it’s used in a more critical context. (Brewer’s Dictionary of

Phrase and Fable suggests ‘an overdressed person who does not really match up to his clothes’). The illustration to the Apollyon episode has Christian in full armour, not seen in the recent Civil War, but a reference to Ephesians 6, confronting the fire-breathing dragon with these lines:

19 See Maxine Hancock’s discussion in The Key in the Window: Marginal Notes in Bunyan’s Narratives (Vancouver: Regent College, 2000), pp. 112-15. Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 43 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

A more unequal match can hardly be,

Christian must fight an angel; but you see,

The valiant man by handling Sword and Shield,

Doth make him, tho’ a Dragon, quit the field.

Not every engraving verse in the fifth edition is so untroubling. The lines to an engraving of Giant Despair and Doubting Castle have a certain interpretive edge to it:

The Pilgrims now, to gratifie the Flesh,

Will seek its ease; but Oh! how they a fresh

Do thereby plunge themselves new grieves unto

Who seek to please the Flesh, themselves undo.

There is a hint at the beginning of the episode that they had become footsore and ‘discouraged, because of the way’, though the figure of

Vain-confidence is more prominent once the episode is under way, and Despair and Diffidence (in the sense of want of faith rather than want of self-confidence) are at the heart of the allegorical meaning.

So the picture verse draws us back to the occasion of all this. The 44 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 picture, meanwhile, reinforces the almost comic folktale qualities of the episode, with (in some later editions) two tiny faces poking out from the grille as well as a feefifofum Giant posing in what must be some kind of animal skin.

When the Second Part finally appeared there were, from the first edition, three illustrations: a revised version of the sleeping portrait, a picture of the three slothful ones on a gibbet in the background with Great-Heart leading the pilgrims in the foreground, and a picture of the executed head of Giant Despair on a pole (See

Fig. 2). The difference between the pilgrims as actual or potential victims in Part One, and the spectacular, physical punishment of their enemies in Part Two is in itself interesting.20 Because the selection of images is narrower, the emphasis is more striking. Both verses are clear additions to our understanding of the episodes. Great-Heart’s support of the young and weak is more clearly summarised in the verse than in the text, though the individual examples are there in the narrative. In the case of Giant Despair, the victorious demolition of the castle in the text is tempered in the picture verse by the warning that ‘Sin can rebuild the Castle’.

20 There is an important discussion of the violence of Part Two in Beth Lynch, John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp.161-64. Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 45 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Now, the fact that these illustrations and their verses appeared in the first edition of the Second Part is a substantial piece of

Fig. 2: Despair’s Head on a Pole. Printed with permission from the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. circumstantial evidence for Bunyan’s authorship of the verses and his approval of the illustrations. Bearing in mind Bunyan’s understandably possessive attitude to his masterpiece, it would be 46 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 strange if it were otherwise. The existence of these illustrations and verses from the beginning is also a testimony to their success in the later editions of the first part.

Reflecting on the meaning of what has happened is a staple of fiction—you can’t imagine Fielding, or Richardson, or George Eliot without it. We can see lines of influence from Philip Sidney as well as

Bunyan contributing to this. But, to employ a rather over-used critical term, Bunyan’s text is quite anxiously self-interpreting. To have such multiple perspectives in the text, some marked as right or wrong, some authorial, some character-based, using the margins, poetry and illustrations as well, is a defining characteristic of the text and its development through the various editions published in Bunyan’s lifetime. The pictures and their verses are a crucial layer in this. Now that they are more generally available, in the new World’s Classics and the Penguin editions, it is time to regard them as canonical, and read them as integral parts of Bunyan’s text.

Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 47 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

George Offor and the Case of T. S.

Christopher Garrett Oklahoma City University

While researching at the Newberry Library in Chicago in June of

2005, I discovered an unpublished letter written by George Offor, editor of The Works of John Bunyan (1853; rev. 1862), inserted in a copy of Youth’s Tragedy (1671) by T. S. In this letter addressed to

Alexander Gardyne dated February 16, 1861, Offor admits his perplexity regarding the problem of identifying T. S. Offor’s letter is a continuation of a discussion in Notes & Queries regarding the identity of T. S. For example, in Notes & Queries on October 20, 1860 J. O. responds to a previous submission by Offor regarding T. S. and concludes by “referring the Query back to Mr. Offor for confirmation and farther elucidation” (317). Evidently in an effort to assist Offor in that invitation, Alexander Gardyne lent two “pamphlets by T. S.” to 48 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Offor; we can assume that these were Gardyne’s copies of Youth’s

Tragedy and Youth’s Comedy by T. S.21 Offor returns the pamphlets and encloses a letter to Gardyne wherein he admits to the complexity surrounding the case of T. S. and declares that the identification of T.

S. as Thomas Sherman depends upon the James Bindley copy of

Youth’s Tragedy.22

Speculating that it is “very probably the same T. S. who published the Second Part of the Pilgrim’s Progress 1682” and that

“[t]here’s some internal evidence that he was a Baptist,” Offor tends to agree with the proposal made by J. O. in Notes & Queries that the writer of Youth’s Tragedy and Youth’s Comedy was also the author of

Second Part of the Pilgrim’s Progress. In response to J. O.’s prior assertion that Sherman was likely a Dissenter, Offor, who by this time has had the opportunity to examine these three literary works, believes that proof exists within these texts (“internal evidence”) that

T. S. was a Baptist. In both this letter and in his brief exposé in The

Works of John Bunyan on this imitative allegory by T. S., Offor shows

21 Copies of Youth’s Tragedy and Youth’s Comedy that contain Gardyne’s stamp are currently held at the Newberry Library and the University of Illinois Library. 22 I am indebted to both Lawrence Mitchell and Maura Ives of Texas A&M University for their assistance in deciphering the handwriting of George Offor.

Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 49 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 a particular fascination with the frontispiece and illustration included in the 1683 edition of Second Part of the Pilgrim’s Progress. As Offor describes in his letter, the illustration (found on page 26 of T. S.’s

Second Part of the Pilgrim’s Progress) depicts “a round dance wherein [persons] skip and jump [around a pit that leads to] Hell.”

Offor also records where he has consulted or searched for Thomas

Sherman: Edmund Calamy’s Register (which includes an “Edward

Sherman”), Palmer (likely his Nonconformist Memorial), Brooks, and a directory of Dissenting Churches (perhaps by Walter Wilson) noting that in the last source he found an entry for a “John Sherman.”23 At the conclusion of the letter, Offor states, “The T. S. we seek was an

English Divine or preacher . . . [not a] [Q]uaker [but] a noncon[formist]

[and] a [B]aptist.” By examining the frontispiece, which features two clergymen—one sleeping and the other standing—Offor makes these assumptions, as he notes the importance of these clergymen wearing

“all black exc[ept] [for a] white band.”

23 The “John Sherman” that Offor has mentioned resided in Dedham, Essex, and served as a rector in the Church of England. An MA graduate of Cambridge, John Sherman wrote a history of the nunnery of Harlton, Cambridgeshire, Historia Collegii Jesu Cantabrigiae, which was edited by J. O. Halliwell in 1840. By 1665 “he was admitted DD by royal mandate”; later “Sherman was appointed prebend and archdeacon of Sarum in 1670, [and] died in London on 27 March 1671.” See J. B. Mullinger, “Sherman, John (d. 1671).” Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 5. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. pp. 329-330. 50 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Although his letter considers the possibility that T. S. is

“Sherman,” Offor cautiously refrains from openly endorsing this identification. After making the initial disclaimer that the identification depends on the “evidence of Bindley’s copy that it represents

Sherman,” Offor merely considers those candidates bearing the last name of Sherman who lived in that era. His statement that

“Sherman” is “very probably the same T. S.” who authored the imitative allegory (i.e., Second Part of the Pilgrim’s Progress) is not rendered in a tone of confidence; in fact, he prefers for the remainder of the letter to use the initials T. S. when referring to the author in question. Perhaps most notable is his concluding sentence offered as a postscript to Gardyne: “Your pamphlets by T. S. are returned herewith.” Offor is apparently not convinced that T. S. should be labeled as Sherman since he has not had the opportunity to examine the Bindley copy and opts instead to wait for more reliable evidence before making a conclusion: “We may accidentally fall into [T. S.’s] company or some account of him. . . .” Offor promises his correspondent that if that happens then he and Gardyne as partners in the venture “will share the spoils equally.” Unfortunately, no documentation in books, essays, or letters has been located showing any further work by Offor on this attribution; he died just three years Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 51 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 later in 1864.

For additional information on T. S. and the problems of authorship and attribution of texts please see my dissertation,

Imitative Sequel Writing: Divine Breathings, Second Part of the

Pilgrim’s Progress, and the Case of T. S. (aka Thomas Sherman).

52 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

The Providential and Scientific Seizures of Giant Despair

Ralph C. Wood Baylor University

Most readers agree that the Doubting Castle scene is one of

Bunyan’s most horrific portraits of evil in the entirety of The Pilgrim’s

Progress. There, as Christian and Hopeful tangle with Giant Despair,

Bunyan gives their inward temptation a frightening outward embodiment. The pilgrims become prey to hopelessness when they wander off the true path and fall asleep on alien ground. Not only does their capture occur at night; they are also thrown into a lightless dungeon. Freud could not have wanted a more appropriate setting for the dark workings of inward desperation. With enormous foresight, Bunyan discerned that despair is not only a perennial but also a uniquely modern temptation. There are passages in both The

Pilgrim’s Progress and Grace Abounding that equal anything in Franz Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 53 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” for their depiction of sheer metaphysical terror.

Bunyan also anticipates the eroticizing of modern life by portraying the Dantesque beast who rules Doubting Castle as being utterly enamored of his vixen wife Diffidence. As Robert Collmer reminds us, Bunyan did not include Diffidence in the first edition of

The Pilgrim’s Progress. Unlike her brutish husband, Bunyan portrays her as a cleverly sinister creature. Her name signals not, as we might expect, a demure modesty and shyness, but a perversely sexual sort of faithlessness. Despair is so enamored of her, however, that he treats her like a lady, addressing her as “my dear” (Bunyan 114).

She takes sadistic pleasure at the sight of innocent suffering, especially the act of self-cannibalization. In their three nights of pillow talk, therefore, she urges her hen-pecked husband first to pummel the pilgrims mercilessly, then to argue them into making “away themselves” (110), and finally, when these ploys fail, to frighten them into suicidal self-destruction by showing them the skulls and bones of the previously slaughtered pilgrims.

It would be a much smaller victory for Despair himself to force

Christian and Hopeful to commit their own self-slaughter rather than simply to butcher force them, yet in every case, Despair obsequiously 54 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 follows his wife’s commands. Yet he tempts the pilgrims to self- annihilation not in old-fashioned so much as peculiarly modern terms.

The pilgrims are hopeless, he argues, not because they will never find eternal life in the Celestial City, but because the character of this present life is intolerable. The first of the great modernist philosophers and one of Bunyan’s most notable contemporaries,

Thomas Hobbes, memorably described mere natural existence as

“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Giant Despair offers a similar sentiment: “For why, said he, should you chuse life, seeing it is attended with so much bitterness” (110).

What Albert Camus announced only in the twentieth century,

Bunyan had already discovered in the seventeenth—that suicide is the quintessential modern problem. Camus linked the rise of suicide in our age to the collapse of faith in the transcendent God of biblical tradition. In agreement with Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre held that for us to be accountable to anything other than ourselves would make us incapable of true freedom, since we would thus be made answerable to a Reality transcending ourselves. Freedom must be absurdly unsponsored and undirected, or else it is unreal. The answer to the ancient question of why there is something rather than nothing is, for

Sartre, quite simple: “Being is without reason, without cause, and Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 55 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 without necessity” (qtd. in Cumming 355). Sartre’s insistence on the world’s godlessness follows the precept laid down by Nietzsche: “If there were God, how could I endure it to be no God!” (qtd. in Jung

928). All three of these “masters of suspicion,” as Paul Ricoeur called them, locate human freedom in total liberation from all divine obligation. For Bunyan, this is to get matters exactly backward: we are imprisoned exactly to the extent that we give our fealty to anything other than God. Suicide is thus the final incarceration of one’s soul within one’s own corpse. For Bunyan’s pilgrims to deny that even God can rescue them, therefore, is for them to commit the sin that may lie beyond forgiveness—the sin against the Holy Ghost.

As Hopeful correctly observes, suicide would be an act not of single but double murder: “for one to kill himself, is to kill body and soul at once” (Bunyan 112).

Christian and Hopeful refuse to make away with themselves by resisting both the threat of the cudgel and the temptation of the mind.

Yet their persevering faithfulness comes at great cost. Hopeful begins to exhibit his own nascent spiritual maturity by reminding Christian that true acts of fidelity, once performed, acquire a permanence that cannot be undone. In moments of profoundest doubt, he declares, one does not desperately pump up one’s own subjective courage so 56 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 much as one remembers past deeds of deliverance. Such recollections of objectively achieved good remain ready to hand:

“Remember how thou playedst the man at Vanity-Fair, and wast neither afraid of the Chain nor Cage; nor yet of bloody Death: wherefore let us (at least to avoid the shame, that becomes not a

Christian to be found in) bear up with patience as well as we can”

(113). The pilgrims’ patient resistance so enrages Giant Despair that he “looked ugly upon them” (112), and thus determines to slay them himself. They escape not by their own bravery, however, but by divine grace. Like Peter in the Jerusalem prison—and perhaps even like Christ during his descent into Hell, since this third night spent in

Doubting Castle is a Saturday—the pilgrims find their release at the dawn of Sunday. Their night-long prayer vigil prompts Christian to remember that the key called Promise hangs about his neck. Though the lock on the prison gate goes “damnable hard” (114), the divine key allows them at last to flee.

This scene has been much criticized. Why, many readers have asked, did the pilgrims not think of the key from the beginning?

Perhaps Bunyan is more spiritually and psychologically discerning than we have noticed. Under the pressure of sheer terror, the mind can forget even the most obvious and necessary things. Only after Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 57 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Christian and Hopeful have prayerfully withstood the fierce allurements to self-destruction do they gain enough inward tranquillity to remember the ready means of their rescue. Yet Bunyan subjects the two pilgrims to a final test. Having been awakened by the creaking of the dungeon door—as if no one had recently escaped from this vault of hopelessness—Giant Despair rushes after them.

Once again, they are saved by what appears to be an act of arbitrary

Providence: the savage guardian of the dungeon falls into another of his periodic conniptions. As the narrator has earlier explained, “he sometimes in Sun-shine weather fell into fits” (112).

Bunyan’s allegory seems transparent: since the Son of God is the Light of the World, his earthly luminosity—when analogically revealed in the sun’s own rays—sends the monster of despair into spasms of madness. Yet something far subtler may also be at work in the Giant’s paralyzing seizures. As I was teaching this passage in

1997 at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, a pre-medical student named Jennifer Beck excitedly declared her discovery of what most—perhaps even all—of Bunyan’s many readers had missed. She pointed out that Giant Despair’s paroxysms are no mere tool of Bunyan’s willful allegory. This beast of hopelessness is exhibiting a well-known neurological phenomenon called 58 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 photosensitive epilepsy.

The power of photic stimulation to trigger brain seizures has been noticed since antiquity. Not until 1885, however, did W. R.

Gowers specifically describe patients who were afflicted with photosensitive epilepsy. By far the most common of the reflex epilepsies, it is caused by an abnormal response of the brain to light.

The symptoms range from total convulsions, to a generalized sense of “absence,” to a rapid blinking of the eyes (myclonia). The disease seems to be genetically determined, since it runs in families. The median age of onset is 14, suggesting that puberty may be a cause, and it occurs nearly twice as often in women as in men. It can be treated with sodium valproate (VPA), but the disease usually disappears during the patient’s mid-twenties (Jeavons 569).

These hard scientific facts reveal that Bunyan was no unscientific man but a careful observer of nature’s outward and visible order, and that he rooted his allegory in it. Perhaps Bunyan had seen epileptics emerge into the light and fall helplessly to the ground in grand mal seizures. Or he might well have known someone who was forced to shun sunlight in order to avoid such fits. If so, he then linked such misfirings of the brain with the fundamental irrationality of evil in the Doubting Castle scene. I contend that Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 59 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Bunyan thereby discerned the true nature of divine action in the world. He was no naïve supernaturalist who believed that an arbitrary Providence ruthlessly tramples secondary causes. Bunyan saw, on the contrary, that the cosmos is characterized by a deep interstitial webbing of human, natural, demonic, and divine forces.

The great Baptist allegorist stands in full continuity with the great catholic tradition that runs from Augustine through Aquinas on to Luther and Calvin. The chief thinkers of the Christian tradition have reached a virtual consensus about miracles as God’s working in and through the natural order, not in wilful violation of it. As Augustine famously said, the whole of creation is at once natural and miraculous. Aquinas described miracles as those events which, because their natural causes remain hidden from us, excite admiratio.

Such is the wonder—the utter miratio—that lies both existentially and etymologically at the root of the word miracle (Placher 135). Calvin noted in similar fashion that, as the one continual sustaining cause of the cosmos, God is always acting within the world: “If God should but withdraw His hand a little,” said Calvin, “all things would perish immediately and dissolve into nothing” (qtd. in Placher 116). Bunyan makes Giant Despair dissolve not into nothingness but into sun- stricken epileptic helplessness. No less than his soul, his body is 60 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 subject to an order that is at once providential and scientific. The entire Doubting Castle scene thus reveals Bunyan to be a deep theologian no less than an original allegorist.

Works Cited

Cumming, Robert Denoon, ed. The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre.

New York: Vintage, 1965.

Jeavons, P. M., A. Bishop, and G. F. A. Harding, “The Progress of

Photosensitivity,” Epilepsia 27(1986): 569-75.

Jung, C. G. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in

1934-1939. Collected Works of Carl Gustav Jung. Vol. 2.

Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.

King, Thomas N. Sartre and the Sacred. Chicago: U Chicago P,

1974.

Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress. Ed. W. R. Owens. Oxford:

Oxford UP, 2003.

Placher, William. The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern

Thinking about God Went Wrong. Louisville: Westminster John

Knox, 1996.

Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 61 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Performing Bunyan: BBC Radio and The Pilgrim’s Progress

W. R. Owens Open University

Sunday afternoons on BBC Radio 4 in the UK are given over to the

‘Classic Serial’, where famous literary works are adapted for radio and performed by actors. The first such ‘classic’ in 2004 was The

Pilgrim’s Progress, broadcast in three instalments on 4, 11 and 18

January. The text was dramatised by Brian Sibley, whose previous credits include radio versions of The Lord of the Rings, Gormenghast, and The Chronicles of Narnia, and among the large cast were a number of well-known actors, including Anton Rodgers, Alec

McCowen, Anna Massey and Neil Dudgeon. Music was composed by

David Chilton, and the production was directed by Pam Fraser 62 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Solomon.

Although billed as The Pilgrim’s Progress, this version in fact also included passages drawn from Grace Abounding and A Relation of My Imprisonment. Sibley evidently decided that the narrative would make more sense to modern listeners if it was presented within a biographical framework, and so the production opens with a powerful dramatisation of Bunyan’s arrest, trial and imprisonment in Bedford gaol, where he gets the idea for writing The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Thereafter, the allegorical story is interwoven with episodes depicting

Bunyan in prison, and we are invited to picture him imaginatively recreating his own experiences in literary form. Thus Christian is mocked by his companions at the beginning, just as Bunyan is taunted by his jailor, who tempts him to abandon his beliefs. Later, as

Christian enters the Valley of Humiliation, the scene cuts to Paul

Cobb, the Clerk of the Peace, trying again to persuade Bunyan to recant. The fight between Christian and Apollyon draws upon images from one of Bunyan’s nightmares in his prison cell, with the healing drink from the Tree of Life being the soothing drink offered to him by his wife as he recovers from a fever. Woven into the trial of the pilgrims at Vanity Fair are moments from Bunyan’s trial, with their heroic stand echoing Bunyan’s own defiance. Giant Despair and Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 63 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Doubting Castle represent the psychological pressures on the prisoner of conscience as the years pass by. Finally, as the pilgrims are entering the Celestial City, Bunyan is getting out of prison after twelve long years. His wife encourages him to think of writing a second part, telling the story of Christian’s wife and children.

In many ways this was a stirring and, at times, moving production. Bunyan’s language was somewhat adapted and simplified to make it more understandable for modern listeners, but on the whole I felt the spirit of the original was preserved remarkably well. Most of the changes were sensible ones, as when the name of the character Legality becomes ‘Lawful Ways’, or Vainglory becomes

‘Much Boasting’, or the Flatterer becomes the ‘Deceiver’, though I couldn’t see why the burden on Christian’s back needed to be described as ‘a heavy knapsack’ with belts and buckles. There was some gender reversal, with Interpreter, Talkative and Ignorance being played as women, but again, I felt that this worked well, offering a variety of voices to the listener. Anna Massey was a most serious and authoritative Interpreter, and Rachel Atkins a very effective Talkative.

She really got across the idea that this character will talk about anything and everything—but it is all just words from the mouth, not the heart. Most importantly of all, there was no glossing over or 64 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 attempt to explain away the religious heart of the book, with its focus on the experience of conversion. Christian was played by Neil

Dudgeon as a perfectly intelligent man even though he is in great distress at the beginning of the work and in need of counsel. He came across as a sympathetic character, as indeed he should, and as someone who could display real courage in overcoming his fears.

The characterisation of Mr Worldly Wise perhaps did not catch the note of social superiority that is there in Bunyan’s portrayal, but on the other hand his arguments sounded very reasonable, so that it was no surprise when Christian takes his advice.

Effective use was made of sound effects to create atmosphere and tension. The fear felt by Christian as he passed the snarling lions at the Palace Beautiful was powerfully evoked. Apollyon’s darts whistled past his ears terrifyingly, and the shrieking of the demons in the Valley of the Shadow of Death was eerily unnerving. Giant

Despair stamped and roared in a most dreadful fashion (comically contrasting with his demeanour at home: a rather hen-pecked husband, grumblingly reluctant to get out of his warm bed at his wife’s behest). Doubting Castle echoed with the clanking of heavy doors and chains, though (perhaps not surprisingly) Sibley did not follow the text in having Christian find the key in his bosom. Here the pilgrims Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 65 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 search the cell and eventually find the Key Promise behind a loose brick. Somewhat disappointingly, the ending of the story, where the music of trumpets and the ringing of bells are so prominent in

Bunyan’s account, made less effective use of sound. The music was slow and sonorous, with long, Mahler-like chords, and the bells rang in rather muted tones, even though the sequence of events in Bunyan had been altered to provide an up-beat ending, with Ignorance being carried off to Hell before the pilgrims enter the Celestial City.

Altogether, though, I thought this was a splendid performance of the book. I have not seen any reviews, but I would have thought that anyone who listened would have been impressed with the portrayal of Bunyan and his steadfast determination to endure suffering rather than give up his most precious beliefs, and would have been carried along by the intelligent and excellently performed adaptation for radio of his famous allegory.

66 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

A Roger Sharrock Item

Vincent Newey University of Leicester

Readers of The Recorder may like to hear of an item I have acquired from the bookseller Alex Alec-Smith (Old School House, Sunk Island,

Hull HU12 ODZ). This is a copy of Roger Sharrock’s Oxford English

Texts edition of Grace Abounding (1962) from the library of the Lake

District writer and poet, Norman Nicholson. Inside was loosely inserted a hand-written letter from Roger Sharrock (27 April 1962) to

Nicholson, thanking him for his kind missive about the volume and, more interestingly, saying how delighted he was to learn that

Nicholson had written the recent discussion of it in TLS. Nicholson had obviously made a positive move to reveal himself to his author in the days of anonymous TLS reviewing. Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 67 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

It is not only this matter of identification that arises; the careful and copious underlining of Sharrock’s “Introduction” to Bunyan’s autobiography—with the main text entirely untouched—gives us a sense of Nicholson’s method in composing his piece, which was seemingly to build it up from elements of his source material. It is not surprising that Nicholson should have been a keen and sympathetic reader of the book, since he had mentioned Bunyan respectfully, if only in passing, in his excellent brief monograph on William Cowper

(1951), during which he explores the stimulus given to Cowper’s mind and imagination by what he calls (rather vaguely, to be sure)

“Evangelicalism.” What he does not consider at all, however, is

Cowper’s prose Memoir of 1767, which has claims to be the most original and compelling Puritan conversion narrative after Grace

Abounding itself, and the fact that the poet conceived his life as a destiny in terms drawn at fundamental points from Bunyan, as when his complaint of a constant “sad vicissitude,” whereby “when I have thought myself on the threshold of a happy eternity, I have been thrust down to hell” (letter to John Newton, 1788), clearly echoes the ups-and-downs of Grace Abounding as well as the ending of The

Pilgrim’s Progress where we are faced with the irresolvable uncertainty of there being a “way to Hell, even from the Gates of 68 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Heaven.” Perhaps after reading the new Oxford edition of Bunyan’s great psychodrama Nicholson would have developed a sharper awareness of the connections, in genre and experiential theme, between that author and the one whose writings he had recuperated with some flair a decade earlier.

In the letter itself, Roger Sharrock goes on to remark that, though he is currently engaged in work on Wordsworth and especially correspondences between the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Sir

Humphry Davy’s views on science and poetry, he hopes to return to

Bunyan later to edit The Holy War—a task of course eventually achieved in collaboration with James F. Forrest, and brought to publication in 1982.

Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 69 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

The Pilgrim’s Path: Sources from Stevington

Kathy Brown

It has long been a tradition within the villages close to Bedford to claim some Bunyan connections. Just over a hundred years ago a local vicar, Albert Foster, wrote Bunyan’s Country,1 a topographical study of The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which he provides a detailed analysis of some of the features that he thought he recognised from the text. He ascribed the nuns at House Beautiful to those of Elstow

Abbey, House Beautiful itself to Houghton House near Ampthill, and the cross to the one standing on the green at Elstow.2

About five years ago, I went to France to design a garden in the

Dordogne. I woke up one morning to find Vera Britain’s In the Steps

1See Bunyan’s Country (London: H. Virtue, 1901; rpt. 1977). 2 “No one can hesitate for a moment as to where the cross at which Christian lost his burden stood” (p. 64). 70 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 of John Bunyan on the table beside my bed. Unlike other writers on the subject, Britain thought that the scene at the cross in The

Pilgrim’s Progress was pivotal, attributing the scene to Stevington, not to Elstow, for she linked it to the sepulchre. This is a vital clue because in Stevington, down the hill from the cross and beneath the wall of the church, is the Holy Well, entombed in sepulchral stone surroundings. It still exists today. With these two landmarks so closely aligned, Britain was convinced that Stevington was an important site.

She also knew that according to local Stevington custom, John

Bunyan preached in the meadows down by the river.

The imagery of the cross and sepulchre are certainly strong indicators of a link between Stevington and The Pilgrim’s Progress.

As soon as I returned from holiday I began to research the history of the village, and my search began to indicate that there were other connections, as well as the physical landmarks. A study of medieval and contemporary documents in Stevington revealed a rich religious history, from medieval pilgrims to the emergence, in the seventeenth century, of a strong, active Baptist community rivalling that of

Bedford. My argument in the remainder of this paper is that

Stevington village and its surroundings may have inspired some of the most memorable incidents and scenes in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 71 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

The Cross

I believe that Bunyan’s account of Christian’s approach to the cross contains a number of clues about the locality that was in Bunyan’s mind. Here is his account:

Now I saw in my Dream, that the high way up which Christian was to go, was fenced on either side with a Wall, and that Wall is called Salvation. Up this way therefore did burdened Christian run, but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his back. He ran thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending; and upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below in the bottom, a Sepulcher. So I saw in my Dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his Shoulders, and fell from off his back; and began to tumble; and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulcher, where it fell in, and I saw it no more.3

The clues are three. First, the cross was approached by a highway, between two walls. Second, it stood on a place “somewhat ascending.” Third, the burden tumbled off Christian’s shoulders and down to the sepulchre where it fell in and disappeared.

Other scholars have identified the cross here with the cross at

3 The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. N. H. Keeble (Oxford UP, 1984), p. 31. 72 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Bunyan’s home village of Elstow, on the green close to where he

played tip cat as a youth, not many years earlier. He certainly knew it

well. But there is no walled highway approaching the Elstow cross, and it sits in the midst of the green, which is as flat as a pancake. By contrast, in Stevington the eastern approach lies between high stone walls, now partly broken through with the development of a recent housing estate.4 The cross is a simple stone shaft in the middle of the

crossroads guarding the route which slopes steeply down to the site

of the old hospitium, the church, and the Holy Well (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Engraving of the ancient cross in Stevington, by Thomas Fisher (1836). Image reproduced with thanks to the Cecil Higgins Museum and Art Gallery,

4 In living memory the banks on either side of the road appeared even higher with bushes growing on the land behind the walls. This is the traditional route recognised by the older members of the Baptist church in Stevington. Vera Britain saw it as the route up Church Road. Either way the interpretation is the same. Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 73 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Bedford.5

The Sepulchre

The Holy Well at Stevington could be recognised as the sepulchre in the story. It is a chamber four feet deep set back into the ancient stone wall surrounding the eastern boundary of the church land (Fig.

2). The chamber has an arched roof of stone and gives the appearance of a cave set into the limestone escarpment on which the

Fig. 2: The Holy Well at Stevington. Photo by author.

5 The cross still stands in the middle of Stevington at the heart of the village. 74 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 church is built. Water seeps out beneath the limestone rock to form a pool of water. The concept of the burden falling in and being seen no more is easy to imagine on a practical level. In theological terms, however, the prospect is even more exciting for here is a receptacle for sin and, at the same time, a source of water emanating from beneath the church. This symbolism is of immense importance.

Bunyan discussed the subject of water at length in The Holy

City, which began as a sermon to inmates in prison, and therefore predates the writing of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Toward the end of the book, he quotes from Revelations 22:1: “And he shewed me a pure

River of Water of Life, clear as Crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God, and of the Lamb.” Bunyan gives several interpretations of the meaning of water. The first is that “no soul can be cleansed or effectually washed from his guilt and filth, but by the Grace of God.”

He also writes that it is called “Water of Life” because whoever drinks it shall “die no more, but the water that Christ shall give shall be in him a Well of water, springing up in him to eternal life.”

The Spring

Bunyan went on to use water as an emblem on several occasions in

The Pilgrim’s Progress. The first is where Christian pauses to drink Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 75 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

from the spring: “I believe then, that they all went on till they came to

the foot of an Hill, at the bottom of which was a Spring. . . . Christian

now went to the Spring and drank thereof to refresh himself” (34).

The foot of the hill in Stevington provides several smaller springs and

one large one known as the Holy Well, forming a clear cool pool of

water, which was known never to have dried up (Fig. 3).6

Fig. 3: Early 19th c. drawing by Thomas Fischer of St Mary the Virgin Church at Stevington. Image produced with thanks to the Cecil Higgins Museum and Art Gallery, Bedford.7

Bunyan’s comments on water in The Holy City have a

6 The small stream from the first spring runs into the water from the second and the two combine to flow through a very boggy area now colonised by butterbur (used as a healing herb in medieval times) in summer and snowdrops in winter. 7 Beneath the wall of the church, two springs emerged, the one seen to the right being the Holy Well. Together they flowed down to the Great Ouse. Note that both the south and the north chapels were in ruins. It was in the north chapel that the broken tombstones lie with symbols of the Tree of Life. The view is almost unchanged today. 76 Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008 remarkable affinity with the underlying meaning of this part of The

Pilgrim’s Progress. Through Christ’s death on the cross, Christian was released of his burden of sin, which then rolled into a sepulchre, a tomb of death, and was swallowed up. Then from the same spot there emerged a stream from which Christian drank to refresh the body but also to quench the spiritual thirst of the soul before going up to House Beautiful and being accepted into the family of the Church.

Bunyan surely recognised the symbolic landscape of Stevington, not only the cross and sepulchre but also the imagery of the crystal clear water flowing out from beneath the threshold of the house of God, a subject about which he wrote at length in The Holy City and The

Water of Life, and more succinctly in The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that Bunyan knew the Bible intimately and used many biblical allusions such as “the narrow way”, “the pit,” and so forth. Yet I think he could quite easily see representations of the scriptures in the Bedfordshire landscape, imprint these pictures on his mind, and then use them readily in his sermons and writings. I have attempted to trace how in The Pilgrim’s Progress there are connections with the village of Stevington, and particularly with the Texting Bunyan: Essays on Attribution, Influence, 77 & Appropriation from The Recorder, 1999-2008

Cross, the Sepulchre, and the Spring; however, it is not just that one or two key places are mentioned. Here we have a whole scenario linked geographically in the script and in close alignment on the ground.

I am not, I hasten to say, claiming the village as the source of the entire landscape of The Pilgrim’s Progress, or that these topographical associations are the most important aspects of the story. Far from it. But while many eminent literary scholars and historians have done much to help readers comprehend the language and allegory of Bunyan’s great work, I feel there is still so much more to understand. I think Bunyan used his knowledge of local customs, local religious issues, and local geography to give the story an added richness. Thus in a small way, my search helps to explain why such an impoverished and uneducated man could create such a masterpiece.