Who Was John Bunyan? The Bedford Tinker Who Wrote Pilgrim's Progress
John Bunyan (1628–1688) was an English tinker and preacher who wrote The Pilgrim's Progress, one of the most widely read Christian books ever published. He grew up poor near Bedford, served as a teenage soldier in the English Civil War, came to faith in Christ after years of inner struggle, and became a Baptist preacher. When he refused to stop preaching without a license, he spent about twelve years in Bedford's county jail. He wrote many books, and the one that made his name, the story of Christian and his burden, came out of those prison years.
Most of what we know about his inner life comes from his own account, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, which you can read free in TheWay Library.
A tinker's son from Elstow
Bunyan was baptized in November 1628 in the parish of Elstow, a village just south of Bedford. His father was a tinker, a man who went from house to house mending pots and pans, and John learned the same trade. He had only a little schooling.
He tells us he was a hard boy. In Grace Abounding he writes that from childhood he had "but few equals … both for cursing, swearing, lying, and blaspheming the holy name of God."
As a teenager, during the English Civil War, he served in the Parliamentary army, stationed at Newport Pagnell. He was there for about three years, then came home to his trade.
Marriage and two old books
Not long after leaving the army he married. We don't know his first wife's name, but we know what she brought to the marriage:
This woman and I, though we came together as poor as poor might be (not having so much household stuff as a dish or a spoon betwixt us both), yet this she had for her part: The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety; which her father had left her when he died.
Grace Abounding, section 15
They read those books together. Their first child, Mary, was born blind, and Bunyan loved her dearly all his life.
A long road to peace
Grace Abounding tells of years of spiritual turmoil. One Sunday, in the middle of a game of cat (tip-cat), he heard what seemed a voice from heaven:
Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven, or have thy sins and go to hell?
Grace Abounding, section 22
The turning point came on a work trip to Bedford. He heard a few poor women talking about the new birth:
I came where there were three or four poor women sitting at a door, in the sun, talking about the things of God
Grace Abounding, section 37
They introduced him to their pastor, John Gifford, and the small independent congregation that met in Bedford. Even then peace came slowly, through long seasons of fear and doubt. One day in a field a sentence fell on his soul: "Thy righteousness is in heaven." He writes:
Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed; I was loosed from my afflictions and irons
Grace Abounding, section 230
Readers of The Pilgrim's Progress will recognize that man. The burden on Christian's back, the Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle all have roots in Bunyan's own experience. You can read the whole story in his words in the main section of Grace Abounding.
Preacher
Bunyan joined the Bedford congregation in the mid-1650s, and the members soon asked him to preach. Crowds came to hear the tinker. He began publishing books, mostly defenses of the gospel and sermons. His first wife died in the late 1650s, and he married again. His second wife, Elizabeth, would prove to be as brave as he was.
Arrest and twelve years in jail
After King Charles II returned to the throne in 1660, meetings outside the Church of England were forbidden. That November, Bunyan was arrested while preaching to a small gathering at Lower Samsell, near Harlington in Bedfordshire. He was told he could go free if he promised to stop preaching. He would not.
His own record of the arrest and hearings is included in the library's edition, in A Relation of my Imprisonment. One of its most moving scenes shows Elizabeth pleading for him before the judges, among them Sir Matthew Hale:
My Lord, I have four small children, that cannot help themselves, one of which is blind, and have nothing to live upon, but the charity of good people.
A Relation of my Imprisonment
When a judge sneered at Bunyan's trade, she answered him:
because he is a tinker, and a poor man, therefore he is despised, and cannot have justice.
A Relation of my Imprisonment
The petitions failed. Bunyan stayed in Bedford's county jail for about twelve years. The separation was hard on him, and he said so plainly:
the parting with my wife and poor children, hath often been to me in this place, as the pulling the flesh from the bones
A Brief Account of the Author's Imprisonment
He supported his family as he could, reportedly by making laces in his cell, and he preached to his fellow prisoners. He also wrote. Grace Abounding was published in 1666 while he was still inside.
Release and pastor
Bunyan was set free in 1672 under King Charles II's Declaration of Indulgence. By then the Bedford congregation had already chosen him as its pastor. He was licensed to preach and spent the rest of his life serving that church and traveling to preach in the surrounding counties and in London. Some people, half joking, called him "Bishop Bunyan."
In the mid-1670s he was jailed again for a shorter term, about six months.
Writing The Pilgrim's Progress
The Pilgrim's Progress was published in 1678. Bunyan wrote it in prison, though historians differ on whether he began it during the long first imprisonment or the short second one. The opening line hints at where the dream came to him:
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 Pilgrim's Progress, opening
The book sold quickly and went through many editions in his lifetime. He followed it with The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), The Holy War (1682), and a second part of The Pilgrim's Progress (1684) about Christian's wife, Christiana, and their children. By the end of his life he had written around sixty works. You can read the first part free here, and find the rest of his books on the John Bunyan author page.
His death
In August 1688 Bunyan rode to Reading to make peace between a neighbor's son and his angry father. The reconciliation worked. On the ride to London he was caught in heavy rain, arrived soaked, and came down with a fever. After about ten days' illness he died, at the end of August 1688, at the home of a friend, a grocer, on Snow Hill in London, and was buried in Bunhill Fields. The friend who added the closing account to Grace Abounding wrote that he died:
following his pilgrim from the City of Destruction, to the New Jerusalem
A Continuation of Mr Bunyan's Life
Why he still matters
Bunyan had almost no formal education, and he knew it. He refused to dress up his story:
God did not play in tempting of me; neither did I play, when I sunk as into the bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell caught hold upon me; wherefore I may not play in relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was
Grace Abounding, the preface
That plainness is why ordinary people have loved him for more than three hundred years. He wrote out of the Bible he knew nearly by heart and out of a heart that had felt both the weight of sin and the joy of being set free.