Puritan & Restoration Age

Hello Friends, 

             This blog is my response to task assigned to us by our Prof. Dr.DilipSir. So let's have a look. 

            John Bunyan (baptised 30 November 1628 - 31 August 1688) was an English writer and Puritan preacher best remembered as the author of the Christian allegory "The Pilgrim's Progress". In addition to The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan wrote nearly sixty titles, many of them expanded sermons.

 Notable works:

1. The Pilgrim's Progress 

2. The Life and Death of Mr. Badman

3. The Holy War 

          Bunyan came from the village of Estlow, near Bedford. He had some schooling and at the age of 16 joined the Parliamentary Army during the first stage of the English Civil War. After 3 years in the army he returned to Elstow and took up the trade of tinker, which he had learned from his father. He became interested in religion after his marriage, attending first the parish church and then joining the Bedford Meeting, a nonconformist group in Bedford, and becoming a preacher. After the restoration of the monarch, when the freedom of nonconformists was curtailed, Bunyan was arrested and spent the next 12 years in jail as he refused to give up preaching. During this time he wrote a spiritual autobiography, "Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners", and began work on his most famous book, The Pilgrim's Progress, which was not published until some years after his release. 

                Bunyan's later years, inspite of another shorter term of imprisonment, were spent in relative comfort as a popular author and preacher, and pastor of the Bedford Meeting. He died aged 59 after falling ill on a journey to London and is buried in Burnhill Fields. "The Pilgrim's Progress" became one of the most published books in the English language, 1300 editions having been printed by 1938, 250 years after the author's death.  

              He is remembered in the Church of England with a Lesser Festival on 30 August, and on the liturgical Calendar of the United States Episcopal Church on 29 August. Some other churches of the Anglican Communion, such as the Anglican Church of Australia, honour him on the day of his death (31 August).

☆ Works of Bunyan

                It is the allegory "The Pilgrim's Progress" written during Bunyan's 12 year imprisonment although not published until 1678 six years after his release, that made Bunyan's name as an author with its immediate success. It remains the book for which Bunyan is best remembered. 

Further allegorical works are as follows:

1. The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680)

2. Pilgrim's Progress Part 2

3. The Holy War (1682) 

4. "Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners", a spiritual autobiography, was published in 1666, when Bunyan was still in jail. 

☆ The Pilgrim's Progress

             "The Pilgrim's Progress: From this world, to that which is to come" is a 1678 Christian allegory written by John Bunyan. It is regarded as one of the most significant works of religious, theological fiction in English literature. It has been translated into more than 200 languages, and never been out of print. It has also been cited as the first novel written in English. 

                The English text comprises 108,260 words and is divided into two parts, each reading as a continuous narrative with no chapter divisions. The first part was completed in 1677 and enter into the Stationers' Register on 22 December 1677. It was licensed and entered in the "Term Catalogue" on 18 February 1678, which looked upon as the date of first publication. After the first edition of the first part in 1678, and expanded edition, with additions written after Bunyan was freed, appeared in 1679. The second part appeared in 1684. There were 11 editions of the first part in John Bunyan's lifetime, published in successive years from 1678 to 1685 and in 1688, and there were two editions of the second part, published in 1684 to 1686.

Taine says, "Next to the Bible, the book most widely read in England is the Pilgrim's Progress....Protestantism is the doctrine of salvation by grace, and no writer has equaled Bunyan in making this doctrine understood."

Argument of Pilgrim's Progress 

                   "As I walked through the wilderness of this world I lighted on a certain place where was a den (Bedford jail) and laid me down in that place to sleep; and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream." So the story begins. He sees a man called Christian setting out with a book in his hand and a great load on his back from the city of Destruction. Christian has two objects, to get rid of his burden, which holds the sins and fears of his life, and to make his way to the Holy City. At the outset Evangelist finds him weeping because he knows not where to go, and points him to a wicket gate on a hill far away. As Christian goes forward his neighbours, friends, wife and children call to him to come back; but he puts his fingers in his ears, crying out, "Life, life, eternal life," and so rushes across the plain.

               Then begins a journey in ten stages, which is a vivid picture of the difficulties and triumphs of the Christian life. Every trial, every difficulty, every experience of joy or sorrow, of peace or temptation, is put into the form and discourse of a living character. Other allegorists write in poetry and their characters are shadowy and unreal; but Bunyan speaks in terse, idiomatic prose, and his characters are living men and women. There are Mr. Worldly Wiseman, a self satisfied and dogmatic kind of man, youthful Ignorance, sweet Piety, courteous Demas, garrulous Talkative, honest Faithful, and a score of others, who are not at all the bloodless creatures of the 'Romance of the Rose', but men real enough to stop you on the road and to hold your attention. Scene after scene follows, in which are pictured many of our own spiritual experiences. There is the Slough of Despond, into which we all have fallen, out of which Pliable scrambles on the hither side and goes back grumbling, but through which Christian struggles mightily till Helpful stretches him a hand and drags him out on solid ground and bids him go on his way. Then come Interpreter's house, the Palace Beautiful, the Lions in the way, the Valley of Humiliation, the hard fight with the demon Apollyon, the more terrible Valley of the Shadow, Vanity Fair, and the trial of Faithful. The latter is condemned to death by a jury made up of Mr. Blindman, Mr. Nogood, Mr. Heady, Mr. Liveloose, Mr. Hatelight, and others of their kind to whom questions of justice are committed by the jury system.  Most famous is Doubting Castle, where Christian and Hopeful are thrown into a dungeon by Giant Despair. 

            And then at last the Delectable Mountains of Youth, the deep river that Christian must cross, and the city of All Delight and the glorious company of angels that come singing down the streets. At the very end, when in sight of the city and while he can hear the welcome with which Christian is greeted, Ignorance is snatched away to go to his own place; and Bunyan quaintly observes, "Then I saw that there was a way to hell even from the gates of heaven as well as from the city of Destruction. So I awoke, and behold it was a dream!"

             Such, in brief, is the story, the great epic of a Puritan's individual experience in a rough world, just as Paradise Lost was the epic of mankind as dreamed by the great Puritan who had "fallen asleep over his Bible."

☆ Literary Characteristics of the Puritan Age

                  In literature also the Puritan Age was one of confusion, due to the breaking up of old ideals. Medieval standards of chivalry, the impossible loves and romances of which Spenser furnished the types, perished no less surely than the ideal of a national church; and in the absence of any fixed standard of literary criticism there was nothing to prevent the exaggeration of the "metaphysical" poets, who are the literary parallels  to religious sects like the Anabaptists. Poetry took new and startling forms in Donne and Herbert, and prose became as somber as Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy'. The spiritual gloom which sooner or later fastens upon all the writers of this age, and which is unjustly attributed to Puritan influence, is due to the breaking up of accepted standards in government and religion. No people from the Greeks to those of our own day, have suffered the loss of old ideals without causing its writers to cry, "Ichabod! the glory has departed." That is the unconscious tendency of literary men in all times, who look backward for their golden age; and it need not concern the student of literature, who, even in the break up of cherished institutions, looks for some foregleams of a better light which is to break upon the world. This so called gloomy age produced some minor poems of exquisite workmanship, and one great master of verse whose work would glorify any age or people, John Milton, in whom the indomitable Puritan spirit finds its noblest expression. 

☆ Literary Characteristics of the Restoration Period

               In the literature of the Restoration we note a sudden breaking away from old standards, just as society broke away from the restraints of Puritanism. Many of the literary men had been driven out of England with Charles and his court, or else had followed their patrons into exile in the days of Commonwealth. On their return they renounced old ideals and demanded that English poetry and drama should follow the style to which they had become accustomed in the gayety of Paris. We read with astonishment in Pepys's Diary (1660-1669) that he has been to see a play called Midsummer Night's Dream, but that he will never go again to hear Shakespeare, "for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life." And again we read in the diary of Evelyn, another writer who reflects with wonderful accuracy the life and spirit of the Restoration, "I saw Hamlet played; but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since his Majesty's being so long abroad." Since Shakespeare and the Elizabethans were no longer interesting, literary man began to imitate the French writers, with whose works they had just grown familiar; and here begins the so called period of French influence, which shows itself in English literature for the next century, instead of the Italian influence which had been dominant since Spenser and the Elizabethans. 

                Dryden, the greatest writer of the age, voiced a general complaint when he said that in his prose and poetry he was "drawing the outlines" of a new art, but had no teacher to instruct him. But literature is a progressive art, and soon the writers of the age developed two marked tendencies of their own, - the tendency to realism, and the tendency to that preciseness and elegance of expression which marks our literature for the next hundred years.

 

1,910 words.

Works Cited:

1. "John Bunyan." - Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc, 25 Feb. 2002, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bunyan. Accessed 3 Jan. 2021.

2. Long, William J. English Literature: Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World. Good P, 2019.

3. "The Pilgrim's Progress." - Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc, 3 Jan. 2021, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pilgrim%27s_Progress. Accessed 3 Jan. 2021.