From the Celestial City to the Emerald City

Abstract

From the Celestial City to the Emerald City Charlotte F. Otten (bio) MacDonald, Ruth K. Christian's Children: The Influence of John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress" on American Children's Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 1989. When I caught the train out of Chicago to go to college as a freshman, I had one suitcase with me. In that suitcase was my father's tercentenary copy of The Pilgrim's Progress, published by the American Tract Society in 1928. I thought I would read it in my freshman year, but my senior year came, and it stood on the shelf untouched (but impressive in its deep maroon and gold) and unread. It isn't that The Pilgrim's Progress wasn't important to me. I first heard it as a child. My father told me the story of Christian, Sunday after Sunday, in exciting episodes, omitting all the theological intricacies, though not the subtleties of conflict. I nearly drowned in the Slough of Despond (he pronounced "Slough" to rhyme with "slew," and that sounded like something David did to Goliath); and [End Page 40] I fought with Giants Pope, Pagan, and Despair. I rejoiced (and breathed a sigh of relief) when I with Christian was welcomed to the Celestial City. After that experience, the printed text, complete with marginal notes, seemed forbidding, even second-hand. When Ruth MacDonald's book arrived, I took the 1928 text down from my shelves and read it. I recognized my copy in her description of it: "In 1928, the tercentenary of Bunyan's birth, the Society issued a commemorative volume of The Pilgrim's Progress, divided into chapters with biblical citations and side notes, copiously illustrated from earlier editions, elegantly bound with gold-leaf lettering and decorations. The large type and wide margins of this volume make a more attractive book than the cramped editions on cheap paper of the earlier Tract Society editions." My own personal reader-history is obviously only a minute part of its world history. This book—so individual and so communal; so theological and so political; so literary and so popular; so parochial and so universal—has been translated into over 200 languages and today is selling well in Third World countries. The Pilgrim's Progress had a world-wide impact from its earliest days. Christopher Hill, in A Tinker and a Poor Man, gives evidence: "It was published in Edinburgh in 1680, in Belfast in 1700. . . . The allegory was translated into Welsh as early as 1687. . . . It was translated into French before 1685. . . . The Pilgrim's Progress was the first English literary work to be translated into Polish. . . . It was published in French in the Protestant Netherlands, in Polish by Lutheran Germans. . . . In the 1850s and early 1860s the Taiping rebels came very near to conquering the whole of China. . . . Their leader . . . called his capital the New Jerusalem. His two favourite books were the Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress. If the Taiping had won, Bunyan's allegory might have become China's earlier little red book" (374-75). Books are different things to different people: it takes no Stanley Fish to tell us that. Adults read different books than children do, though they read the same books. MacDonald recognizes these differences in her influence study. She begins with the suitability of The Pilgrim's Progress to a juvenile audience, examines its appeal to the American reading public from its initial appearance to the present, shows its influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American children's works (including television), and concludes with a bibliography of children's editions of The Pilgrim's Progress published in the United States. In discussing the suitability of The Pilgrim's Progress for the child reader, MacDonald cites the opinions of a number of critics who have attempted to discover reasons for its appeal to children. The reasons run like this: it is exciting and suspenseful on its literal level; it has primordial image patterns that children enjoy; it pays respect to the narcissism of the child; it reveals the psychological adolescence of the hero; it is high romance, a heroic fairy-tale adventure with a happy ending; it is an...