The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
John Bunyan · an allegory in prose, delivered under the similitude of a dream · the First Part · Nathaniel Ponder, London, 1678, in the text Bunyan enlarged in the editions of 1679 · scored on Bunyan’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Allegory as vernacular prose narrative; a dream vision, a journey, a trial and a conversion narrative in one plain telling
Mythos
The pilgrimage from the doomed city to the holy one; the burden, the narrow gate, the house of instruction, the monster in the valley, the companion lost to martyrdom, the giant’s dungeon, the mountain of vision and the river of death
Phase
One life of faith told as one journey, from the burden in the City of Destruction to the far side of the River, and last a soul led away from the gate
Presentation
Prose, with no chapter divisions in Bunyan’s text; a verse Apology before and a verse Conclusion after; short verses sung or spoken by the pilgrims, scripture cited in the margins, and the dream broken once before the last stretch
Register
From the plain cadence of the English Bible and the speech of the shop and the road to terror in the valleys, low comedy among the worldly, and the grave close at the River
Scale
One man’s road, holding his conscience, the family he leaves, a market, a court of law, the church and its false teachers, and death
Governing Proposition
A man with a burden on his back leaves his city, his wife and his children, and walks a narrow road to a holy city, losing his burden at a cross, fighting a monster in a valley, losing one companion to martyrdom at a fair and gaining another, lying in a giant’s dungeon, and crossing a river without a bridge to the gate. The wager of the book is that salvation is a way walked and not a state held; that every place on the way is a state of the soul and every person met there a disposition; and that the end is not known until it is reached, so that a man can find a way to hell at the very gate of heaven.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book is The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That which is to Come: Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream, and the work scored here is its First Part, published by Nathaniel Ponder in London in 1678, in the text Bunyan himself enlarged in the second and third editions of 1679. Bunyan, a tinker and Baptist preacher of Bedford, was imprisoned for unlicensed preaching from 1660 to 1672 and again briefly in the later 1670s, and the First Part was written in gaol; in which of the two terms is disputed. The Second Part of 1684, the journey of Christiana with her children and Mercy, is a separate book and is not scored.
Before the story stands a verse Apology, in which the author defends writing in similitudes, against friends of whom some urged him to print and some forbade it. Then the dreamer speaks: “As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den”. He sleeps there, and dreams, and in his dream he sees a man with a burden on his back. The narrative that follows has no chapters. It runs on as one road, broken only by short verses that the pilgrims sing or speak, by the scripture cited in its margins, and by the dreamer’s plain joins: “Now I saw in my dream”.
The man, Christian, lives in the City of Destruction with his wife and children, and he cannot stay. He runs from his house and his family with his fingers in his ears, “crying, Life! life! eternal life!”. The first ground he crosses is the Slough of Despond, Bedfordshire mud as much as despondency. He meets Mr Worldly Wiseman, in an episode Bunyan lengthened when he enlarged the book. Christian comes at last to the Wicket Gate, narrow, and the road beyond it lies straight.
Movement II
Past the gate is the Interpreter’s House, the house of instruction, and past that the Cross. There the burden is loosed from Christian’s back and tumbles down into a sepulchre. The book tells it in the plainest words it has. The release the whole first stretch has been moving towards takes a sentence or two, and the road goes on: the Hill Difficulty, then the Palace Beautiful.
Then the descent. In the Valley of Humiliation Apollyon comes against Christian, straddling the whole breadth of the way, and Christian fights him. Humiliation comes first, and the darker valley after it. The Valley of the Shadow of Death is a narrow path between a ditch and a quag, in darkness, with the mouth of hell beside it, and the dread is sustained the length of it.
In that valley a fiend steps up behind him and whispers blasphemies into his ear, and Christian believes they come from his own mind. It is the book’s most exact disclosure. Bunyan, who had set down his own conversion in Grace Abounding (1666), puts on the page the experience of thoughts that arrive unbidden, and the guilt of taking them for one’s own. No doctrine is needed to recognise it. The terror of the valley is not only in the dark and the quag; it is in not knowing which voice is one’s own.
Movement III
Out of the valley Christian gains a companion, Faithful, and the road becomes talk. They fall in with Talkative, and the argument with him is a quarrel on the road. The book holds that no soul is saved alone, and from here to the River Christian never walks without a companion. The dialogues are long, and some go slack; the book is pouring doctrine into conversation, and the conversation could stand as a tract.
Then the town. Vanity Fair is a market with its rows and its wares, where every ware is sold, honours, places, lusts and souls. Faithful is tried before a bench of local justices. The jury who condemn him are named: Mr Blind-man, Mr No-good, Mr Malice, Mr Love-lust, Mr Live-loose and the rest. They are allegory and they are neighbours, and the trial is a country court.
Faithful is put to death and burned. The book tells it with the literal force of Foxe’s martyrs, and the allegory presses here towards history. His death hands the narrative on: Hopeful joins Christian for the rest of the road, and his name is what Christian needs for the second half. The companion lost to martyrdom and the companion found are one movement of the book.
Movement IV
Past the fair comes the low comedy of the worldly. By-ends of the town of Fair-speech has kin, Lord Turn-about, Lord Time-server, Mr Facing-both-ways and the parson Mr Two-tongues, and he and his friends trade reasons for following religion for gain. He will go with religion when it walks “in his silver slippers”. Then come Demas and the hill Lucre. The comedy and the doctrine obey the same law: every person on the road is a disposition, and these are the dispositions of respectable piety.
Beside the road, over a stile, lies By-path Meadow, pleasant to walk in. Christian and Hopeful leave the way by the stile, and come into the hands of Giant Despair of Doubting Castle. They lie for days in his dungeon, and he counsels them to kill themselves. Despair comes here, after the companion is gained and not before, and the order is the book’s.
Then Christian remembers: “a key in my bosom called Promise”. The release was carried in with them the whole time, and despair was the forgetting of it. The pilgrims regain the way and come to the Delectable Mountains, the mountain of vision. Doubting Castle is the episode that still repays a reader who has never believed.
Movement V
The last stretch brings Ignorance, who means to come to the city by his own sincere belief, and the pilgrims catechise him on the Enchanted Ground, at length. Before this last stretch the dream breaks once: the dreamer wakes, and sleeps, and dreams again. The road then runs through Beulah and comes to the River, which has no bridge.
Christian and Hopeful go into the water. Christian sinks, and Hopeful holds his head above it, and they cross, and the city is seen through the gate. This is the highest passage of the book. The dreamer, who has seen and not intervened through the whole road, sees within the gates, a breach in his own frame. The reader stands where the believer stands, watching a life he cannot steer to its end.
Ignorance comes after them, ferried over the River by Vain-hope, and at the gate he has no entry. He is bound and carried away to a door in the side of a hill, and the dreamer sees that there was “a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven”. Then the dreamer wakes. The book does not end at the gate with the saved but at a hillside door with the lost, and on the dreamer’s own uncertainty. A verse Conclusion follows. The way was walked to its end, and the end, the book says, is not known until it is reached.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is necessary: a man with a burden must reach the Cross to lose it and the River to die, and every station between is a stage of the soul’s experience that Bunyan had lived and set down in Grace Abounding (1666). The order of the trials is not arbitrary: humiliation comes before the dark valley, the fair before the giant, and despair after the companion is gained. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the middle. The road form admits addition, and Bunyan proved it, enlarging the Worldly Wiseman episode and other passages in 1679 without strain: the episodes are permitted rather than compelled. The long dialogues, with Talkative, with By-ends and his friends, Hopeful’s account of his conversion and the catechising of Ignorance, could each lose half and the book would know the same things.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The book discloses an articulated condition: the anxious conscience of a believer who cannot be sure of his salvation, and the shapes it takes. The disclosures are exact. In the Valley of the Shadow a fiend whispers blasphemies into Christian’s ear and he believes they come from his own mind: intrusive thought, and the guilt of mistaking it for oneself. In Doubting Castle the release was carried in the whole time, “a key in my bosom called Promise”. By-ends, who will follow religion when it walks “in his silver slippers”, discloses the social bargain of respectable piety. What holds it at the gate’s edge is a doctrine it does not examine: Ignorance is damned at the gate for a sincere but wrong belief, and the book does not see what that discloses about itself.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The heights are real and they recur. The burden loosed at the Cross and tumbling into the sepulchre is release told in the plainest words. Apollyon, straddling the whole breadth of the way, is terror given a body. The Valley of the Shadow, a narrow path between a ditch and a quag in darkness with the mouth of hell beside it, is sustained dread. The close is the highest passage: Beulah, the River without a bridge, Christian sinking and Hopeful holding his head above the water, the city seen through the gate. After it comes a cold summit few books place last, “a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven”. Frequency holds the figure down: long stretches of argued doctrine between the heights do not elevate, and the verses are flat.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Here the book is strongest. The archetype is not evoked; it is the frame and every load in it: the journey from the doomed city to the holy one, the burden, the narrow gate, the house of instruction, the descent into the valley, the monster fought, the companion lost to martyrdom and another found, the giant’s dungeon, the mountain of vision, the river of death. Yet the particulars stay particular. The Slough is Bedfordshire mud; Vanity Fair is a market town with its rows and wares and its bench of local justices; the jury that condemns Faithful, Mr Blind-man, Mr No-good, Mr Malice, Mr Love-lust, Mr Live-loose and the rest, are neighbours with names. The names are allegory and character at once. Held below the highest because its world is one road, with no cosmos around it.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The inheritance was old: Deguileville’s pilgrimage allegory, known in English through Lydgate, the morality play, Spenser’s allegorical romance, and the Puritan guides on the plain man’s pathway to heaven. Bunyan’s turn was to move allegory out of verse romance and out of the sermon into a vernacular prose narrative of a man walking, in which abstractions talk like people of a market town and an argument is a quarrel on the road. The stake was real twice over. Fiction itself was suspect among his own people, and the verse Apology records that some urged him to print and others forbade it; and the author was a tinker and unlicensed preacher, writing in gaol without learning or patron. Held near the gate because the form, the soul’s pilgrimage, was proven and the doctrine wholly inherited: the swerve is in the telling.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Its doctrine is that salvation is a way walked, not a state held; that the way is narrow and lies straight; that it can be left by a stile into a pleasant meadow; and that the end is unknown until it is reached. The road is that doctrine. The dream frame works too: the dreamer sees and does not intervene, which puts the reader where the believer stands, watching a life he cannot steer, and the last waking, set directly after Ignorance is carried to the hillside door, ends the book on the dreamer’s own uncertainty. The companions are formal necessity, since the book holds that no soul is saved alone. Charged: the dialogues are form as container, doctrine poured into a conversation that could be a tract.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The evidence of return is long: three and a half centuries of readers, the admiration of Coleridge and Macaulay, and modern study of the book as psychology, as social history of Dissent, and as a source of the English novel. It yields on its psychology more than on its doctrine: Doubting Castle and the whispering fiend still repay a reader who has never believed. What holds the axis at 8.3, with The Encompassed the lowest but one, is the allegorical key. Once a figure is named, Hopeful, Talkative, Ignorance, much of its meaning is fixed, and the book’s own marginal notes close readings that a less governed text would open. Readers come back to it and it yields steadily, but less than works whose meanings are not given in their names.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The field is English literature of the later seventeenth century, where Milton stands above it on force. The force is high: a plain prose narrative of an ordinary man’s inner and outer life, in dialogue and incident, set down before the English novel existed, which reorganised allegory as a story to be followed rather than a scheme to be decoded. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: edition after edition from 1678, translation into a very large number of languages through the missionary presses, two centuries as a household book of English and American Protestants, and named descendants: Little Women, its chapters framed on the stations (“Playing Pilgrims”); Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, which takes its title; Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Rail-road”; the copy Huck finds on the Grangerfords’ table; Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress; and the plain narrative prose from which Defoe worked.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Span of centuries, and the text whole. Bunyan’s own enlarged text of 1679 survives entire and has been in print without a break since; there is no loss of form to charge. Presence has been unbroken for three and a half centuries, in households, churches and schools, and in translation across the world, and its places are in common speech: the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, the Delectable Mountains, Doubting Castle. What holds it within the centuries’ band: its general reading has thinned since the early twentieth century, and it is now read more by the devout and the student than by the general reader, though it is not neglected; and part of its surface is fixed to a doctrine and a dissenting moment that the book has nonetheless plainly outlived.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The prose is the craft, and it is very good: short, concrete and rhythmic, made of the English Bible and the speech of the shop and the road. The first sentence, “As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den”, sets the cadence of the whole. Christian running from his family with his fingers in his ears, “crying, Life! life! eternal life!”, shows the economy of gesture. The naming is a craft of its own: By-ends of Fair-speech, his kin Lord Turn-about, Lord Time-server and Mr Facing-both-ways, the parson Mr Two-tongues, each name a character sketch. Charged: the verse interludes are weak, the doctrinal conversations go slack and repeat, the dreamer reports what he could not have seen, and the joins are often a bare “Now I saw in my dream”.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One law governs: the way is the life of faith, every place a state of the soul, every person a disposition. Take the two most distant elements, the low comedy of By-ends and his companions trading reasons for following religion for gain, and the River at the end: they obey the same law, and the tone moves between them without a break. The literal and the allegorical do not always lie on one plane. Christian’s wife and children are real people left in a real city, while his companions are virtues; Faithful’s trial and burning are told with the literal force of Foxe’s martyrs, which presses the allegory towards history; the frame leaks, as the dreamer sees within the gates; and the one break in the dream is a seam of the composition. These are small breaches in a law that holds over a wide range.
Score: 8.6 / 10
What the book holds in one structure: the individual consciousness above all, in fear, despair, temptation and hope; the family, in the opening abandonment of a wife and children; the market and commerce at Vanity Fair, where every ware is sold, honours, places, lusts and souls; the state and the law, in the trial and its justices; the church, in its houses and its false teachers; and death and the sacred, which govern the whole. Labour and the natural order are present mainly as figure, and history is absent by design on a timeless road. The book integrates these orders under one law, but it is one man’s road through them, and its world beyond the road is thin. The figure says what this form encompasses.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.2 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.9. The pilgrimage built as the whole frame of the book while its slough, fair and jury stay local and solid; a text whole and in print without a break since 1679, whose places are in common speech; and a plain prose narrative of an ordinary man’s life, set down before the English novel existed, read in households for two centuries and taken up by Alcott, Thackeray, Hawthorne and Twain.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.8. The road form admits addition, as Bunyan’s own enlargement of 1679 shows, and the long dialogues with Talkative, By-ends and Ignorance could each lose half without loss of knowledge. Above it, The Bottomless Well and The Encompassed at 8.3: the allegorical key fixes much of a figure’s meaning once it is named, and the book is one man’s road through its world, which beyond the road is thin.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.6 against the 9.0 the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That which is to Come: Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream, scored as the First Part, published by Nathaniel Ponder in London in 1678, in the text Bunyan enlarged in the second and third editions of 1679; the enlargements are his, made within the work’s life as his book, and are part of the work. The verse Apology and the verse Conclusion are part of it; chapter headings supplied by later editions are not. The Second Part (1684) is a separate book, named as context and not scored. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain; the Apology’s couplet on the friends who urged and forbade printing is paraphrased. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the length of the First Part, the remark often credited to Johnson on the book’s readers, and the claim that it stands second only to the Bible among English books in translation. Which of Bunyan’s two imprisonments saw the book written is disputed and is left open.