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  • The Case for The Pilgrim's Progress
  • Ruth K. MacDonald (bio)

While The Pilgrim's Progress was not written specifically for children it has an important place in the history of children's literature. In fact, many scholars of children's literature do consider The Pilgrim's Progress to be a children's book, an assessment based more on some adults' pleasant (though inaccurate) memories of their own childhood reading than an actual evaluation of the book. I am the first to admit that the book is hardly a children's book as it stands. Few children read it nowadays. But my advocacy for it rests on the fact that children in large numbers, both American and British, read it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and for good reasons.

Fictional readers of The Pilgrim's Progress include Huckleberry Finn, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and Rebecca Rowena Randall of Sunnybrook Farm, all Bunyan readers, presumably, because their adult creators read the book in their own childhoods. These fictional children are voracious, if sometimes indiscriminate readers. Some, like Alcott's girls, take Bunyan's story to heart, religious message and all. Some, like Huckleberry Finn, peruse it only briefly, with only passing interest and perhaps shallow understanding. Still others, like Rebecca Randall, read it because it is available, along with a hodgepodge of other books, both secular and religious, both popular and more highly literary.

That so many children read The Pilgrim's Progress, that so many editions were prepared especially for them, that so many adults forced the book on children, indicates that something about the book made at least some children and adults think that it was appropriate children's fare. The preponderance of evidence for a juvenile audience also lies on this side of the Atlantic, rather than in England. What made The Pilgrim's Progress such a significant book to English-speaking peoples, especially Americans, and their children?

Scholars of American children and their literature have noted that since the time of the Puritans, American children have been the most preached-at children in history. The future of both Puritanism and the American Republic lay on the shoulders of Puritan children; though Puritan parents believed in liberty of thought, they also recognized that if the great social experiment of their faith were to survive, their children would have to think as the parents did. Therefore, parents sought to control what their children thought by preaching, haranguing, threatening, and disciplining, in any way that would make sure American children grew up right.

In Bunyan, Puritan parents found a hero—one who suffered at the hands of English law, who posited a democratic paradise at the end of political strife, who wrote in a plain English style similar to American English, who produced a wonderful revenge fantasy in which all the bad guys roast in hell while the good guys live happily ever after in a land of plenty. The facts of Bunyan's own life were kept alive for readers in the life of the author frequently included in nineteenth-century editions of The Progress. The allegory of the godly, though flawed, hero, a poor man who proves himself triumphant over the urban, educated, wealthy, godless villains, is a typical rags-to-riches story of the sort Puritans and Americans took to heart. And while there are moments of humor in the work, the book is clearly serious and not likely to mislead children, as novels, fairy tales, and other frivolous literature might. The book also does not have any sex, which might pervert young minds. There was everything to approve, and nothing to disapprove; so The Pilgrim's Progress became a children's book.

In the American colonies of the eighteenth century, The Pilgrim's Progress was available both in imported and native editions. But it was not until the American Tract Society and the American Sunday-School Union began their publishing efforts in the eighteen-twenties that The Pilgrim's Progress became widely available. The Sunday-School Union sought to make attractively bound books with gilt over brightly-colored leather covers, to be sent throughout the United States for children and adults to read...

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