The Work
John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (Part One, 1678; Part Two, 1684) was from its first publication one of the most widely read books in the English language, second only to the Bible in Protestant households throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the early nineteenth century the complex allegorical text was being systematically adapted for child readers - simplified in language, abridged in length, illustrated with woodcuts or engravings, and sometimes supplemented with scripture references and moral commentary. Hundreds of such adaptations appeared between 1800 and 1950, published by religious tract societies, denominational publishing houses, and commercial publishers across Britain, America, and the British Empire.
These adaptations were not marginal productions. They were carefully constructed projects to transmit the spiritual geography of the original - the Slough of Despond, the Hill of Difficulty, Vanity Fair, the Delectable Mountains, the Celestial City - to children who could not be expected to read the seventeenth-century prose unaided. The best of them, such as Mary Godolphin's Pilgrim's Progress in Words of One Syllable (1884), became classics in their own right. The collective enterprise constitutes one of the most sustained projects of biblical narrative transmission in the history of children's publishing.
Biblical Engagement
Hebrews 11:16 - 'But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city' - is the Pauline text that Bunyan most directly dramatizes. Christian's journey is the physical enactment of the faith described in Hebrews 11: the faith that walks toward a city not yet seen, sustained by the promise of its existence. The adaptations preserved this Hebrews 11 structure even when they simplified everything else: the journey toward the Celestial City is the plot's essential movement, and no simplified version could omit it without ceasing to be Pilgrim's Progress at all.
Matthew 7:13-14 - 'Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it' - is embodied in the wicket gate through which Christian must pass at the beginning of his journey. The narrow gate is a concrete image that child readers could visualize and remember; it taught the Matthean theology of two ways - the broad way of the world and the narrow way of life - through story rather than doctrine.
Hebrews 12:1 - 'Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us' - resonates in the central image of Christian's burden, which falls from his back at the cross. The burden is sin; the cross is the place of liberation; the continuing journey is the race of Hebrews 12. Child readers were taught that the Christian life was both pilgrimage (Hebrews 11) and race (Hebrews 12), both journey toward a city and running off a burden.
Revelation 21:2 - 'And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband' - is the vision that draws Christian and Hopeful toward the Celestial City through the final chapters. The city shining on the hill is John's New Jerusalem; the river they must cross is Death. The adaptations typically preserved this apocalyptic climax, simplifying the prose but not the theology: the Celestial City remains the goal of every true pilgrim.
Alcott and Little Women
The most celebrated literary echo of the Bunyan adaptations is Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), which opens with the March sisters gathered around the fire at Christmas, each having received a small copy of Pilgrim's Progress from their mother Marmee. The novel explicitly structures the girls' moral development through the allegory: each girl faces her own version of Vanity Fair, the Hill of Difficulty, and the Slough of Despond. Alcott's use of the Bunyan framework allowed her to explore the spiritual formation of girls in a Protestant culture without preaching directly - the allegory did the theological work while the realistic story did the emotional work.
Author and Context
John Bunyan (1628-1688) wrote the original Pilgrim's Progress during his second imprisonment in Bedford Gaol (1660-1672 and 1675-1676), jailed for preaching without a license. The allegorical framework - a dream vision of a journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City - drew on the biblical tradition of journey, the medieval tradition of allegorical romance (Langland's Piers Plowman, Spenser's Faerie Queene), and the Puritan tradition of spiritual autobiography. The names - Christian, Faithful, Hopeful, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Apollyon - embodied moral categories that Bunyan drew from his intensive reading of the King James Bible.
The adaptors of the nineteenth century worked within the tradition of the Evangelical and Dissenting communities that had always claimed Bunyan as their own. The Religious Tract Society, founded in 1799, was a major publisher of Bunyan adaptations; its children's editions were distributed through Sunday schools, mission stations, and denominational bookshops across the British Empire and North America.
Themes
The adaptations transmitted several core theological themes in narrative form: the universality of sin (the burden all must carry), the efficacy of the cross (the only place the burden falls), the reality of temptation (Vanity Fair, the Giant Despair), the community of believers (Christian is joined by Faithful and Hopeful), and the certainty of heaven (the Celestial City is real and reachable). These themes, absorbed through story in childhood, formed the theological vocabulary of generations of Protestant readers.
Reception and Legacy
The Bunyan adaptation tradition was so successful that it effectively merged with children's Christian fiction as a genre. Frances Hodgson Burnett, George MacDonald, and C.S. Lewis all wrote in the tradition of moral-spiritual children's fiction that Bunyan's adaptors helped establish. The Narnia Chronicles are the most celebrated twentieth-century continuation of the tradition: Lewis, who absorbed Bunyan through childhood, wrote an allegorical fantasy for children that transmits the same biblical geography - the journey toward Aslan's country, the sacrifice at the Stone Table, the temptations of the voyage - in a new imaginative form.