Home › The Marble Faun › The Marble Faun: Bunyan

The Marble Faun: Bunyan

BUNYAN JOHN BUNYAN was born at Elston, England, in November, 1628. His father was a rough tinker, but managed to send the boy to the village school. In the crude home, current religious notions were so vividly impressed upon the child's mind that he frequently had terrifying visions of evil spirits bearing him away to eternal torment.

At seventeen, he served for a year in the army. Two years later he married a woman whose only dowry was two religious books. They intensified his religious fervor. After a long and terrible spiritual struggle he conquered his sins, the worst of which were liking to ring the church-bell and dancing on the village green.

The spirit of preaching now lay such hold upon him that he attracted great crowds. In 1660 he was arrested as a Dissenter and thrown into the Bedford jail, where he spent the greater part of twelve years. He enjoyed occasional precarious freedom, and was allowed to preach to sixty other Dissenters in prison, but he worried much about his wife and four little children. Nevertheless, his confinement was a boon, for it gave him leisure for the thinking, out of which grew his incomparable "Pilgrim's Progress." He began to write it in jail, but it was not published until six years later. The irresistible charm of the thrilling, fairy-tale quality, combined with its "reverence for God and sympathy for man," won immense popularity at once. The last years of his life were rich in activity and acclaim. He preached to great audiences in London and elsewhere, but remained simple and passionately earnest to his death in 1688.