Pilgrim's Progress

Allegory by John Bunyan, published in 1678–84, that describes the journey through life to the Celestial City of a man called Christian. On his way through the Slough of Despond, the House Beautiful, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, and other landmarks, he meets a number of allegorical figures.

In The Pilgrim's Progress the worlds of biblical and English rural culture are successfully fused; the simple plot has taken on the quality of a myth, and the symbols have become a continuing part of the language. For a long time the book was read by ordinary people as a devotional manual and was often, with the Authorized Version of the Bible, the only book in the household; in the literary world its quality was recognized only by a few. Opinion began to change with Southey's preface to his 1830 edition of The Pilgrim's Progress, and references to it permeate 19th‐century fiction; its influence, for example, lies behind works as diverse as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Louisa Alcott's Little Women, and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.