The Pilgrim's Progress was begun in a Bedfordshire jail and never out of print
John Bunyan, a nonconformist preacher, started his allegory behind bars for holding unlicensed religious services. Published in 1678, The Pilgrim's Progress has been translated into more than 200 languages, has never gone out of print, and is sometimes called the first novel in English. Its hero sheds his great burden surprisingly early in the story.
Bunyan was imprisoned in Bedfordshire under the Conventicle Act of 1664, which banned worship outside the Church of England. Early scholars such as John Brown thought he began the book during a six-month stay in 1675. More recent critics, notably Roger Sharrock, place its start in his first and much longer imprisonment, from 1660 to 1672, right after he finished his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding.
The whole work is framed as a dream. Its everyman hero, Christian, lives in the City of Destruction and carries a crushing load, the knowledge of his sin, which he picked up from reading the Bible. Evangelist points him toward the Wicket Gate, but Mr Worldly Wiseman lures him off toward the village of Morality, where Mr Legality promises relief through good behaviour. A fiery, overhanging Mount Sinai blocks the way until Evangelist exposes the trick. At the gate, Goodwill, revealed in the second part to be Jesus, sets Christian on the narrow King's Highway.
Soon, at the place of deliverance, a cross and an open tomb, the straps snap and the burden tumbles away. The rest of the journey tests faith instead. Christian battles the dragon-like Apollyon in the Valley of Humiliation, stumbles through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and reaches Vanity Fair, a market built by Beelzebub selling every earthly pleasure. His companion Faithful is tried there and burned as a martyr. With a new friend, Hopeful, Christian resists a silver mine on a hill called Lucre, where the hypocrite By-Ends vanishes for good.
The book runs to 108,260 words in two continuous parts without chapters. The first was entered on 18 February 1678, the accepted publication date, and an expanded edition followed in 1679; the second part came out in 1684. Eleven editions of the first part appeared in Bunyan's lifetime. Translations reached Dutch in 1681, German in 1703 and Swedish in 1727, and the editor Robert McCrum has said no English book except the Bible matches its reach.
Source: The Pilgrim's Progress
