"'Pilgrim's Progress' has been translated into more languages," says Canon Edmund Venables, in his life of John Bunyan, "than any other book in the English tongue;" and Southey thinks, "there is no European language into which it has not been translated."
Who wrote it? A travelling tinker, in prison; "A man," says James Anthony Froude, "whose writings have for two centuries affected the spiritual opinions of the English race in every part of the world more powerfully than any book or books except the Bible."
John Bunyan was born at Elstow, a little village about a mile from Bedford, England, in 1628. "Few villages," says Canon Venables, "are so little modernized as Elstow. The old, half-timbered cottages with overhanging stories, peaked dormers, and gabled porches, tapestried with roses and honeysuckles, must be much what they were in Bunyan's days."
The parish church is a part of the old Benedictine nunnery, founded here in 1078 by Judith, niece of William the Conqueror, in honor of the mother of the Emperor Constantine.
Thomas Bunyan, the father of the renowned author and preacher, was a tinker, "a mender of pots and kettles." He was married to his first wife, Anne Pinney, before he was twenty years of age. She died four years later, apparently without children; and Thomas was soon married again to Margaret Bentley, who became the mother of John Bunyan.
Poor as the parents were, "of that rank," says Bunyan, "that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land ... it pleased God to put it into their hearts to put me to school, to learn both to read and write."
There was a school at Bedford at this time, founded in Queen Mary's reign by the Lord Mayor of London, Sir William Harpur. Thither probably the lad walked day after day, but he seems to have learned little, and that little he soon forgot.
At an early age he was obliged to help his father at the forge, where, he says, he was "brought up in a very mean condition among a company of poor countrymen."