John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Nonconformist Prison Literature

Abstract

John Bunyan lived during a century filled with civil, religious, and cultural strife. The previous chapter on Lilburne attests to the implications of political dissent. As a result of the political and religious revolutions of the seventeenth century, the period is full of prison literature written from a variety of viewpoints and positions within society. As political systems and power structures shifted—from monarchy to republic and back to monarchy, or from a national church to relative religious independence and toleration then back to a tightly regulated national church—people who found their fortunes reversed by the cultural upheaval were forced to make sense of the existential crisis of lost agency. For example, King Charles I wrote a prison narrative, Eikon Basilike, in which he sought to justify his divinely authorized kingship while facing the government’s executioner. Furthermore, Richard Lovelace, an imprisoned courtier and poet who supported the losing side in the English Civil Wars, wrote the lines, “Stones walls do not a prison make, / Nor iron bars a cage.”¹ John Milton also penned a prison drama, Samson Agonistes. None of their writings, however, proved as popular as those of John Bunyan.