John Bunyan Biography and Books

He called himself the chief of sinners, and he meant it. John Bunyan was a mender of pots who spent twelve years in a county gaol rather than promise to stop preaching, and who dreamed there a dream that has been carried into more languages than almost any book but the Bible. He was not a scholar. He had, by his own reckoning, almost nothing when he began — no learning, no standing, no money, and for a long stretch of years, no peace. What he had was a conscience that would not let him alone and a Saviour who would not let him go.

The Tinker’s Son

He was born in 1628 at Harrowden, a hamlet in the parish of Elstow, just south of Bedford, and baptised in the Elstow font on 30 November of that year. His father was a tinker — a mender of pots and kettles — and John took up the trade after him. The family were poor, though not destitute; they owned the cottage they lived in. It was a small world, and Bunyan would spend nearly the whole of his life inside a few miles of it.

He learned to read and write, which was more than many of his neighbours could do, and then, as he tells it, he did his best to forget everything good he had ever been taught. In Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, the autobiography he wrote in prison and published in 1666, he is merciless about his own youth. He was a swearer and a Sabbath-breaker, the ringleader of the village young men in their sports. Modern readers, looking for the great scandal behind such self-accusation, generally fail to find one; his sins were the ordinary sins of an ordinary young man, magnified by a conscience that had been given eyes. That is worth noticing. Bunyan is not confessing to spectacular wickedness. He is confessing to being a sinner — which, it turns out, is harder.

In 1644 his mother and his sister died within weeks of each other, and his father remarried almost at once. That same year, at sixteen, Bunyan was mustered into the Parliamentary army and posted to the garrison at Newport Pagnell under Sir Samuel Luke. He saw little fighting. But he came home with one memory he never lost, and he set it down plainly:

When I was a soldier, I with others, were drawn out to go to such a place to besiege it; but when I was just ready to go, one of the company desired to go in my room: to which, when I had consented, he took my place; and coming to the siege, as he stood sentinel, he was shot in the head with a musket-bullet and died.

— John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

Another man stood in his place and took the shot that was meant for him. Bunyan records it among the mercies of his life — and then, with characteristic honesty, admits that at the time it did not move him at all. “Here, as I said, were judgments and mercy,” he writes, “but neither of them did awaken my soul to righteousness.”

Two Books and a Dish and a Spoon

He came home to Elstow, took up the tinker’s trade, and married. The record does not preserve his first wife’s name, which is one of the quiet griefs of Bunyan scholarship, for she may have done more for his soul than anyone before Gifford. They were, he says, as poor as poor might be — “not having so much household stuff as a dish or a spoon betwixt us both” — but she brought a dowry of two books left her by her godly father: The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety. They read them together. The books did not convert him, he says, but they began something.

Their daughter Mary was born in 1650, and she was blind. She will matter enormously later.

Then, in the middle of a game of cat on the green — a stick-and-ball game the village young men played — something broke in on him. He had struck the ball one blow and was about to strike it a second time when, he says, “a voice did suddenly dart from heaven into my soul,” asking him whether he would leave his sins and go to heaven, or have his sins and go to hell. “At this I was put to an exceeding maze,” he wrote; “wherefore leaving my cat upon the ground, I looked up to heaven.” He stood there in the field, a young man with a stick in his hand, and felt himself looked at.

Three or Four Poor Women, Sitting at a Door in the Sun

What followed was not a conversion. It was the beginning of a long, wandering, agonising search that would take something like five years. Bunyan became outwardly religious, and rather pleased with himself about it. He was, he says, “a brisk talker” in matters of religion. And then he walked down a street in Bedford one day about 1651 and overheard a conversation that undid him.

They were poor women, sitting at a door in the sun, doing their work and talking. He drew near to listen, expecting to be able to join in. He could not. “I heard but understood not,” he writes, “for they were far above, out of my reach.” Their talk was of a new birth, of the work of God on their hearts, of how God had visited their souls with His love in the Lord Jesus, and of the promises that had held them up under the assaults of Satan. They spoke, too, of their own wretchedness of heart and unbelief, and they despised their own righteousness as filthy and insufficient to do them any good.

Bunyan went away shaken. He had thought himself a religious man. These women were speaking a language he did not know, out of an experience he did not have. He began to seek them out. He told them his condition, and they told their pastor, John Gifford, of him — and Gifford, a man with a hard past of his own, took the tinker in. He invited Bunyan to his house to hear him talk with others about the dealings of God with their souls. Bunyan sat under Gifford’s preaching, and said of him afterwards that his doctrine “was much for my stability.” Gifford taught his people to take no truth on trust from any man, but “to cry mightily to God, that He would convince us of the reality thereof” — because when temptation comes, borrowed convictions do not hold. Bunyan was to test that teaching to destruction. He joined the Bedford congregation in 1653 and was baptised by Gifford in the River Ouse.

The Years in the Dark

Any honest account of Bunyan must slow down here, because he did. The middle of Grace Abounding is one of the most harrowing records of spiritual distress in the English language, and it is the reason the book is still read. For months — years — Bunyan was tormented by the fear that he had committed the unpardonable sin.

The temptation came as a voice, and it came constantly: sell Christ, part with Him, let Him go. He fought it, he says, until he was almost out of breath, twenty times together. And then one morning, worn down, he felt the thought pass through his heart: Let Him go, if He will — and felt his heart consent to it. “Now was the battle won,” he writes bitterly, “and down fell I as a bird that is shot from the top of a tree, into great guilt, and fearful despair.”

What followed was years of horror. He was certain he was Esau, who sold his birthright for one morsel of meat and found no place of repentance afterwards though he sought it with tears. That verse followed him like a hound. It would “fly in my face like lightning.” He heard the sound of Esau’s fall in his ears. He was so raw that every sudden noise sounded to him like Fire! fire! He believed himself damned, and went about his work in Bedford as a man already sentenced.

It is important not to tidy this up. Bunyan was not being coy or rhetorical; he was, by any reasonable description, in profound and prolonged anguish. And he did not pray his way out of it in a week. He wrote it all down, decades later, because he thought some other poor soul in the dark might need to know that a man could be there and still be Christ’s.

The deliverance, when it came, came as suddenly and as unbidden as the despair:

But one day, as I was passing in the field, and that too with some dashes on my conscience, fearing lest yet all was not right, suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul, Thy righteousness is in heaven… I also saw moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself. Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed.

— John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

His righteousness was not in his heart, where he had been frantically searching for it and never finding it. It was in heaven, at God’s right hand, and it was a Person. The chains fell off his legs — the man who wrote that sentence had not yet seen the inside of a prison. He would.

The Tinker in the Pulpit

The Bedford church discovered that their tinker could preach. He preached first to small gatherings and then to crowds, with an urgency that came straight out of the pit he had climbed from. “I preached what I felt,” he said — what he smartingly did feel.

Then the King came back. With the Restoration in 1660 the old penal laws returned, and preaching outside the Church of England became a crime. In November 1660 Bunyan rode out to preach at Lower Samsell, a farm near Harlington. He was warned that a warrant was out and that he should not go. He went. He would not, he reasoned, have his people say that their preacher had run at the first sign of trouble. They had just begun the meeting in prayer when the constable came in.

The indictment against him has a lovely, absurd pomposity to it: that John Bunyan, of the town of Bedford, labourer, “hath devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming to church to hear Divine service, and is a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventicles.” The sentence was three months. He served twelve years, because at the end of every offer of release stood the same condition — stop preaching — and he would not take it.

When one of the justices told him plainly that he must stretch by the neck for it, Bunyan gave the answer that has outlasted every one of his judges’ names:

I told him, as to this matter, I was at a point with him; for if I was out of prison to-day I would preach the gospel again to-morrow, by the help of God.

— John Bunyan, A Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr. John Bunyan

The Pulling of the Flesh from the Bones

Bedford gaol was not a dungeon. Bunyan was a prisoner of conscience, not a felon; he had visitors, a measure of liberty, and stretches of unofficial leave. He made long-tagged bootlaces by the thousand to send money home. Blind Mary came to the prison with a jug of soup for her father — the jug is still kept in Bedford.

And it very nearly broke him. Not the confinement. The family.

The parting with my wife and poor children, hath often been to me in this place, as the pulling the flesh from the bones… especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer my heart than all besides: Oh! the thoughts of the hardship I thought my poor blind one might go under, would break my heart to pieces.

— John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

“Poor child!” he writes, “thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion in this world! Thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind should blow upon thee.” He knew exactly what he was doing to them: “I was as a man who was pulling down his house upon the head of his wife and children; yet, thought I, I must do it, I must do it.” He held on by two texts — Leave thy fatherless children, I will preserve them alive, and Verily it shall be well with thy remnant — and by one bare conclusion: “I must venture you all with God, though it goeth to the quick to leave you.”

His second wife Elizabeth — he had married her in 1659, a year after his first wife died — was barely out of girlhood and carrying his child when he was arrested. The shock put her into labour; she laboured eight days, and the baby died. In 1661 she stood before the judges at Bedford and petitioned for her husband, three times, and she was magnificent. She told Sir Matthew Hale: “My Lord, I have four small children that cannot help themselves, of which one is blind, and have nothing to live upon, but the charity of good people.” Hale asked how so young a woman came to have four children. She answered that she was only their step-mother, having not been married to him two years — and then told him about the eight days and the child that died. Hale looked very soberly at her and said, “Alas, poor woman!” Judge Twisden told her she made poverty her cloak. She got nothing. She went home.

The Ladder

Early in his imprisonment, not knowing the law, Bunyan became convinced that his sentence might end at the gallows. And the tempter met him there with the cruellest question of all: what if, when you come to die, you have no evidence upon your soul for a better state hereafter? He was ashamed, he said, at the thought of dying with a pale face and tottering knees in such a cause as this — of giving the enemy occasion to reproach the way of God for its cowardice. So he prayed. And nothing happened.

What came to him at last was not comfort but a duty. It was for the word and way of God that he was in this condition; therefore he was engaged not to flinch a hair’s breadth from it. God might choose whether to give him comfort now or at the hour of death — but he might not choose whether to hold his profession. “I was bound,” he wrote, “but He was free.” And so he made the most reckless resolution of his life: “I will leap off the ladder even blindfold into eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell, Lord Jesus, if Thou wilt catch me, do; if not, I will venture for Thy name.”

The Dream in the Den

He wrote in prison, prodigiously — Christian Behaviour, The Holy City, Grace Abounding itself. And somewhere in those years, most likely in the later stretch of the long imprisonment, he began an allegory that he seems at first to have thought a distraction from more serious work.

It opens: “As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream.” The Den was the gaol. Everything that follows — the burden, the Slough of Despond, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, Doubting Castle and Giant Despair, the river at the end with no bridge — came out of the life you have just read. Christian’s despair is Bunyan’s despair. The burden falls off Christian’s back at the cross because Bunyan’s chains fell off his legs in a field outside Bedford.

The Pilgrim’s Progress was published in 1678, after his release, and it went everywhere. Part Two, following Christiana and the children, came in 1685. A tinker who never went to university wrote the book that, for two centuries, sat beside the Bible on English-speaking shelves — because he wrote it in the plain speech of people who worked with their hands, and because every inch of it had been paid for.

Bishop Bunyan

He was released in 1672 under Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence and licensed to preach. The Bedford congregation had already chosen him as their pastor while he was still in gaol. For sixteen years he rode — across Bedfordshire and the counties around it and down to London — preaching, settling disputes, visiting the scattered meetings, and writing. They called him Bishop Bunyan, half in affection and half in mischief, since a bishop was the one thing a Bedford Nonconformist could never be. He was briefly imprisoned again in the mid-1670s. In 1685, when persecution stirred once more, he quietly made over all his property to Elizabeth by deed of gift, so that they could not take it from her if they took him.

The River

In August 1688 Bunyan rode to Reading to reconcile a father and his son who had quarrelled. He succeeded. Then he rode on to London through a storm and arrived at his friend John Strudwick’s house on Snow Hill soaked to the skin. A fever took him. He died there on 31 August 1688, aged fifty-nine, and was buried in Strudwick’s vault in Bunhill Fields, among the Dissenters.

His last errand was making peace between a father and a son. It is hard to imagine a better one for the man who wrote that the way to the Celestial City runs through the valley, and that the pilgrim who goes down into it need not go alone.