Pilgrim Tour Guide: Pilgrim's Progress Real Estate and Gentrification

Critics of The Pilgrim's Progress the Second Part (Part II, 1684) complain about it lacking drama: the route is much the same, the danger is escalated in number of fight encounters at the same time as being trivialized by protector Great-Heart's swift victories. The family dynamics dwell on instruction to women and children, there are arrangements for marriage, and a clutter of other underdeveloped support cast members are picked up and folded into the pilgrim group along the way.

I think these criticisms rightly recognize the way in which we approach the book today as readers, but the critique might justifiably address our inability to read Bunyan well equally or more so than it addresses Bunyan's ability to write. My students have a tendency to conflate a book with a novel. It happens when they write about their textbooks in papers. This tendency writ large affects us as readers of Part II. (I just got hold of a discounted copy of Jordan Stein's brilliant When Novels Were Books which deals with the question of the emergence of the novel from an Early Modern English marketplace of books devoted to polemics of an often religious flavor and fervor.)

In a "Pilgrim Tour Guide" assignment, I ask students to describe and interpret the differences in the presentation of the same locale across both Parts of TPP. They choose from The Interpreter's House, the Cross, the Palace Beautiful, Vanity, the Valley of Humiliation, and the Delectable Mountains.

I'll be writing on this over the next few months, and am pondering whether the contemporary term of "gentrification" would be worth bouncing around in the discussion. In any case, if you have the book this comparison exercise is most edifyiing - particularly, for me, in the case of the Valley of Humiliation. If you don't have the book, the Norton Library series does a pleasingly bright covered edition!