John Bunyan 1628-1688

We know about Bunyan's life primarily from his autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). His father was a poor village tinker (a maker and repairer of metal utensils), and Bun­yan received only the simplest education before taking up his father's trade. He eventually married and fought with the Parliamentary army during the Civil War. But as the title of his autobiography suggests, the important thing in Bunyan's life was an intense religious struggle, through which he became convinced of his own sinful unworthiness, and eventually of the gift of grace and salvation. He joined one of the many Baptist sects flourishing in England during the Commonwealth and became a dedicated preacher. When Charles II reinstated the monarchy and the Church of England, he promised leniency to Protestant Dissenters such as Bunyan. But the Anglican hierarchy was less forgiving. Many from the Dissenting sects, including Bun­yan, were imprisoned. Although he remained in jail for twelve years, Bunyan continued to preach to his fellow prisoners and to write religious books. He was released and allowed to become the pastor of a Nonconformist church in Bedford, but in 1675 he was imprisoned again. It was during this second imprisonment that he wrote his most inspired work, The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is To Come (1678). Over the centuries it has been the most widely read work produced during the Puritan Age, and one of the most popu­lar pieces of Christian writing ever to appear in English.

The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory — a narrative in which general concepts such as sin, despair, and faith are represented as people or as aspects of the natural world. In The Pilgrim's Progress, the basis of the allegorical narrative is the idea of life as a journey. The traveler's name is Christian, and he represents every Christian. The figures and places Christian encounters on his journey stand for the various experiences every Christian must go through in the quest for salvation. The liveliness and power of Bunyan's allegory derive from his ability as a storyteller and from his skill at main­taining a convincing relationship between ele­ments of the fiction and their spiritual signifi­cance. General Christian ideas are given vivid, immediate life. Bunyan's prose, modeled on that of the King James Bible, is clear enough to be fol­lowed by any reader, and it is always full of specific and plausible detail.

Lecture 8

The Restoration and Eighteenth Century

Plan:

1. Restoration England

2. England in the Eighteenth Century

3. John Dryden

4. Samuel Pepys

THE RESTORATION

It is customary to date the beginning of a new literary period with oration in 1660, when the Stuarts returned from exile to the throne. This historical convention has more to recommend most. It was a time when people sought to establish society: arts on a firm basis, and a time when dislike of change: a guiding principle, so that there was a deliberate attempt to lings the way they were. But change is inevitable, and order survives except by evolving into new kinds of order. Literary tendencies after the middle of the eighteenth century, like the social scene reflect, are filled with hints that the old order was breaking and that new ways of understanding the world were bound to follow. In literary history a significant turning point is the publication in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads, a deliberately innovative collection of poems by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1773-1834).