Strudwick had already purchased a plot for a family vault in Bunhill Fields and it was his intention that Bunyan’s remains would be placed there too, though Bunyan was initially buried in the “Baptist Corner” at the back of the burial ground. John Strudwick survived another nine years, himself dying in 1697. There is no record of when Bunyan’s coffin was placed in the Strudwick vault although one might guess it was soon after Strudwick’s burial; the surviving burial ground registers only begin in 1713.
The Strudwick monument (located E. & W. 25, 26—N. & S. 26, 27) took the form of a large Baroque stone chest. The vault beneath would eventually contain, in addition to Strudwick and Bunyan, the bodies of eleven other adults and two infants. Walter Wilson records the inscriptions on the tomb before its later remodelling :
Here lies the body of Mr. JOHN STRUDWICK, who died the 15th January, 1697, aged 43 years.
Also the body of Mrs. PHŒBE BRAGGE, who died the 15th of July, 1718, aged 49 years.
Here also lies the body of the Rev. ROBERT BRAGGE, Minister of the Gospel, who departed this life, February 12, 1737, ætatis 72.
Mr. THEOPHILUS BRAGGE, died September the 25th, 1768, aged 29 years.
Dr. ROBERT BRAGGE, died June 13, 1771, aged 77 years.
Also, Mrs. ANNA JENNION, great grand-daughter of the Rev. ROBERT BRAGGE, died the 9th of February, 1780, aged 62 years.
Also, Mrs. SARAH POOLE, daughter of Mrs. Anne Jennion, died the 9th of September, 1784, aged 32 years. Also lyeth here two of their infant Children.
On the Right Side.
Here also lieth the Remains of Mrs. ANNE HOLYHEAD, Sister of the above-mentioned Mrs. Sarah Poole, who, after laboured above twelve-months through much pain and weakness, from a fatal fall, calmly resigned her breath, the 2d Nov. 1788, aged 33 years.
Here also lies the precious Remains of a most affectionate Sister, Mrs. ELIZABETH JENNINGS, who died in the Lord the 11th of June, 1798, aged 61 years.
On the Left Side.
Mr. JOHN BUNYAN, author of the Pilgrim’s Progress, Ob. 12th August, 1688, æt. 60.
Undisturbed rests here the unfettered clay of Mr. JOHN JENNINGS, late of Newgate Street, who, after many wearisome days and nights, finished well his course the 6th of March, 1800, aged 57 years.
Entombed in this vault the Remains of that once blooming young man, Mr. JOHN LONG, late of Abbot’s-Langley, Herts, (a cousin of Mr. Jennings’s) who, after enduring the pains of a deep consumption, a few months, willingly resigned his departing spirit, in view of a better state, the 16th of August, 1804, aged 24 years.
At the Foot.
Here rests in hopes of future bliss, the once amiable and much admired youth, Ensign JOSEPH JENNINGS POOLE, of the 3d Regiment of Royal East India Volunteers, who, through a rapid consumption, fell asleep in Jesus, the 31st January, 1799, aged 22 years, and was interred with military honours.(John Strudwick’s daughter Phoebe had married Robert Bragge in 1698; it is her descendants that fill the vault. Thirteen adults and two children is quite a lot to pack into one tomb, but then the multiple occupancy of burial plots is very much a feature of Bunhill Fields.)
Frontispiece: The works of John Bunyan. Edited by George Offor
(Glasgow : Blackie, 1853-1854).
Bunyan suffered 12 years imprisonment for preaching without a licence, and his Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, what some regard as the first great English novel, was probably written during his periods of imprisonment. First published in 1678, it has never been out of print since. Twenty editions had been published by 1695 and at least 1300 by 1938. The book most translated into other languages after the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress has been translated into more than 200 languages, with Dutch, French, and Welsh editions appearing during Bunyan’s lifetime.
Illustrations were first added to The Pilgrim’s Progress in 1680, only two years after the book was first licensed for publication. For the fourteenth edition (1695), two sets of designs—the 1680 illustrations and those from a Dutch translation of 1685—were abridged and combined in a sequence of fourteen woodcuts, establishing a standard iconography of the Progress for decades to come. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Blake’s one-time friend and later rival, Thomas Stothard, made a set of sixteen Pilgrim’s Progress designs that were engraved and issued—separately from the text—in 1788. These proved very popular and influential and were included in various editions of The Pilgrim’s Progress from 1792 onwards. (Stothard was himself buried in Bunhill Fields on 6 May 1834.)
From childhood, like everyone who grew up in the eighteenth century, Blake would have known the story—Christian with his burden on his journey from the City of Destruction through the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair to the gates of the Cœlestial City and the Three Shining Ones—which he seems to have admired despite his stated view of allegory as an “inferior kind of Poetry” :
The Hebrew Bible & the Gospel of Jesus are not Allegory but Eternal Vision or Imagination of All that Exists. Note here that Fable or Allegory is Seldom without some Vision, Pilgrim’s Progress is full of it.—BLAKE. “A Vision of The Last Judgment" (re-punctuated)
William Blake, “The Man Sweeping the Interpreter’s Parlour”. Relief etching.
About 1824 (though Keynes and Norvig suggest a much earlier date, perhaps the 1790s), when Blake was 67 years old, he made a “woodcut on pewter”, a relief engraving known as “The Man Sweeping the Interpreter’s Parlour” (Pilgrim’s Progress, Part 1). The parlour is the uncleansed heart; the man who raises the dust is the Law, which only revives and increases sin; the maid who allays the dust with her sprinkling is the Gospel. The young disciples (the “Ancients”) who convened around Blake in the 1820s, dubbed him “the Interpreter” and called his London home “the House of the Interpreter”. In addition to this single print, Blake also made a series of twenty-eight watercolour drawings to illustrate the book.
The honorific title the Ancients gave to Blake points up his affinity with Bunyan. Bunyan imagines the Holy land with a powerful sense of intimacy: his promised land is constructed of everything that is earthly and familiar, and Christian reaches a Jerusalem that is conspicuously similar to Bunyan’s own beloved Bedford. William Blake’s English Jerusalem affirms what Bunyan had already suggested—the unique role played by the “Holy Land”, as both territory and metaphor in English culture—that England and the Holy Land were not the separate places that history and politics might imply :
The fields from Islington to Marybone
To Primrose Hill and Saint Johns Wood:
Were builded over with pillars of gold,
And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.—BLAKE. Jerusalem
One might also note that Blake’s use of the name “Beulah” for the state next to Eternity may well have been inspired by Bunyan’s rapturous description of Beulah, the Earthly Paradise, where his pilgrims dwell before crossing the river of death into Heaven.
John Bunyan, Divine Emblems : or, Temporal things spiritualized, etc. (London: C. Dilly, 1790)
Bunyan was popular as an author not only of The Pilgrim’s Progress, but also of the first emblem book written expressly for children: A Book for Boys and Girls; or, Temporal Things Spiritualized (1685), which in Blake’s day came to be called Divine Emblems. Bunyan’s emblem sequence has been suggested as one of Blake’s major models for his own series of emblems, For Children: the Gates of Paradise, though Blake’s emblems make their first appearance in his Notebook alongside designs that would reappear in the Songs.
Bunyan’s Divine Emblems, like Isaac Watts’s Divine and Moral Songs for Children (1715) was a staple of children’s education throughout the eighteenth century. By the time of the tenth edition (1770) of Divine Emblems, the publisher had the pious philanthropist market very much in mind :
Price 1s. or 10s. per dozen, or 3l. 15s. per hundred to those who buy them to give away.
In these and other contemporary works for children, the determined focus on indoctrination into moral orthodoxy is painfully apparent. Watts’s influence on Blake’s Songs has long been recognised, but Bunyan has an influence too on the Songs. Of course Blake avoids their insistent moralising.
To take just one example, Blake’s “Little Black Boy” reads to me as a riposte to Bunyan’s verses about Moses and his Æthiopian wife. I cite the 1793 text:
XXXII.
Of Moses and his Wife.
THIS Moses was a fair and comely man;
His wife a swarthy Æthiopian:
Nor did his milk-white bosom change her skin.
She came out thence as black as she went in.
Now Moses was a type of Moses’ law,
His wife likewise of one that never saw
Another way unto eternal life;
There’s myst’ry then in Moses and his wife.
The law is very holy, just and good,
And to it is espous’d all flesh and blood:
But yet the law its goodness can’t bestow,
On any that are wedded thereunto.
Therefore as Moses wife came swarthy in,
And went out from him without change of skin:
So he that doth the law for life adore,
Shall yet by it be left a black-a-more.
Bunyan here is drawing on the tradition alluded to in NUMBERS XII. 1 :
And Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married : for he had married an Ethiopian woman.(Moses’s wife is perhaps Zipporah, or, following Josephus, Tharbis.)
The words of “Moses and his wife” seem to relate to Bunyan’s Calvinist theology. I’m not sure if I properly understand this poem but perhaps Bunyan is saying that Moses’s wife’s black skin is an emblem of a spiritual darkness, while for Blake skin colour is an irrelevance:
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white.—BLAKE. “The Little Black Boy.”
Bunyan’s Emblem XVIII: The Sinner and the Spider, and Emblem XXIX: Of the Rose-bush, are also worth exploring as possible influences on the Songs.
Blake’s mother, Catherine, had been a member of the London Moravian Congregation (taking a full part in the life of the church) from November 1750 until her marriage to James Blake in October 1752, and may well have continued to attend services after that. There is, it seems to me, a constellation of Blake, Bunyan, and the Moravian Church (often referred to as a “Pilgrim Church”) that suggests themes for exploration. I list the first few that come to mind.
—The Moravian poet James Montgomery contributed a long introductory essay to an edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress published by William Collins in Glasgow in 1828. Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” from Innocence was reprinted in The Chimney-Sweeper’s Friend and Climbing Boy’s Album (1824), edited by Montgomery, who shared several mutual acquaintances with Blake.
—The influence on both John Bunyan and William Blake of the mystical thought of the “Teutonic philosopher”, Jacob Boehme. Between 1645 and 1662 most of Boehme’s treatises and the majority of his letters were printed in English translation (they had circulated in manuscript from the 1630s). They constituted, I would suggest, the most significant religious writing circulating in seventeenth-century England; though Boehme’s influence on Bunyan is still largely unexplored.
—Jan Amos Comenius (Jan Amos Komenský), 1592–1670, was the last bishop of the Unitas Fratrum before the re-establishment of the Moravian Church under Count Zinzendorf. Comenius was greatly influenced by Boehme and quoted Boehme in his writings; indeed he may have known not only the published works but also some of Boehme’s unpublished work via his contacts in Görlitz.
Illustrated London News (27 January 1865).
By the 19th century, Bunyan’s tomb had fallen into decay, but following the closure of the burial ground in 1854 a public appeal for its restoration was launched under the presidency of the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. This work was completed in May 1862, and comprised a complete reconstruction of the monument, undertaken by the sculptor Edgar George Papworth, senior (1809–66), retaining the basic form of the tomb-chest, and protected by a substantial railing. It is now an impressive memorial, carrying not only a recumbent effigy of Bunyan on the top of it, but also two relief panels to its sides depicting the figure of Christian—one with his burden on his back, and the other with it rolling off at the foot of the Cross. The inscription at the foot is “John Bunyan, author of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ Obt. 31 Aug. 1688. Æt. 60”; while at the head is another recording the fact that the tomb was restored by public subscription in 1862. The monument was further restored in 1928 (the tercentenary of Bunyan’s birth), and again after World War II (following serious wartime damage to the effigy’s face). Bunyan’s tomb is now listed Grade II*, along with Defoe’s obelisk.
"Bunyan's Tomb in Bunhill Fields", from The Queen’s London: A Pictorial and Descriptive Record of the Streets, Buildings, Parks, and Scenery of the Great Metropolis in the Fifty-ninth Year of the Reign of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (London : Cassell & Company, 1897), page 271.
Bunyan was the wandering tinker who became the convinced pilgrim, and fought the lion and the giant. To stand by Bunyan’s tomb in Bunhill Fields is to muse on the way his name rhymes with the graveyard’s name—and to remember all those whom he inspired. When the cemetery was still in use, many people desired to be laid as near as possible to the creator of Christian the Pilgrim. Forgetting the medieval origins of Bunhill Fields, some even thought he had given his name to the burying-ground :
Monday 15 [April 1776] At 6 this evening Brother Latrobe … interred the corpse of our late Sister Elizabeth Bradshaw in Bunyan (vulgarly called Bunhill) Fields burying ground during our Burial Liturgy.—Moravian Archive. Daniel Benham, MS extracts from the London archives of the United Brethren.
Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress not just as a guide to the Christian life, but to set liberty of conscience against the state’s authority and the conformity of the rich, the corrupt, the careerist, and the spineless. When the Independent newspaper was founded in 1986 with offices overlooking the burial ground, the editor Andreas Whittam Smith led a small delegation to lay flowers at Bunyan’s tomb. Bunyan, who spoke truth to power and was imprisoned for speaking out, still directly addresses anyone who feels they are in the power of Mr Worldly-Wiseman, “my Lord Turn-about, my Lord Time-server, my Lord Fair-speech ... also Mr. Smooth-man, Mr. Facing-both-ways, Mr. Any-thing; and the parson of our parish, Mr. Two-tongues”.
On 17 April 2013 I sat down to watch the television coverage of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. Whatever one may have thought of the mad old bat, the not-a-state-funeral made for compulsive viewing, and I was pleased that the Order of Service announced Bunyan’s “Pilgrim hymn”, supposedly one of her favourite hymns. Unfortunately, what the congregation gathered in St. Paul’s Cathedral to sing was not Bunyan’s words, but Percy Dearmer’s bowdlerised version from the English Hymnal of 1906. That’s when I had to switch off. The Thatcher family would have known no better, but the cathedral clergy are supposedly educated men. Oh dear.
“To Be a Pilgrim” (opening line: “Who would true valour see”) is the only hymn John Bunyan is credited with writing, and is indelibly associated with him. These words were sung by Mr Valiant-for-Truth, “a man with his Sword drawn, and his Face all bloody”, in Part 2 of The Pilgrim’s Progress, and recalls the words of HEBREWS 11:13: “...and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.”
Dearmer’s hymn (“He who would Valiant be”) is a softened and modernised version of Bunyan’s poem, replacing the archaic opening of verse 1, losing the lion of verse 2 (but keeping the giant), and disposing of the hobgoblin and foul fiend in verse 3. Its success is more to do with the wonderful tune provided for it by Ralph Vaughan Williams than Dearmer’s flaccid words. Recent hymn books have tended to return to Bunyan’s original.
So here it is, one of the very greatest of English hymns :
Who would true valour see,
Let him come hither;
One here will Constant be,
Come Wind, come Weather
There’s no Discouragement
Shall make him once Relent
His first avow’d Intent
To be a Pilgrim.
Who so beset him round
With dismal Stories,
Do but themselves Confound;
His Strength the more is.
No Lyon can him fright,
He’ll with a Gyant Fight,
But he will have a right
To be a Pilgrim.
Hobgoblin, nor foul Fiend,
Can daunt his Spirit;
He knows, he at the end
Shall Life Inherit.
Then Fancies fly away,
He’l fear not what men say,
He’l labour Night and Day
To be a Pilgrim.
Sources and Further Reading
Robert N. Essick.—The separate plates of William Blake : a catalogue.—Princeton NJ : Princeton University Press, 1983.
Rosemary Freeman.—English Emblem Books.—London : Chatto & Windus, 1948.
Chapter VIII : “John Bunyan, the End of the Tradition”.
John Andrew Jones, ed.—Bunhill Memorials : Sacred Reminiscences of Three Hundred Ministers and Other Persons of Note, Who Are Buried in Bunhill Fields, of Every Denomination. With the Inscriptions on Their Tombs, and Other Historical Information Concerning Them from Authentic Sources.—London : James Paul, 1 Chapter House Court, North Side St. Paul’s Church-Yard, and Paternoster Row, and Sold by All Booksellers, 1849.
Maev Kennedy.—”Burial Ground of Bunyan, Defoe and Blake Earns Protected Status : Bunhill Fields in North London, Where Nonconformists, Radicals and Dissenters Are Buried, is Declared Grade 1 Park”.—The Guardian (Tuesday, 22 February 2011).
Geoffrey Keynes.—Blake Studies. Essays on his Life and Work.—2nd [revised] ed.—Oxford : Clarendon Press 1971.
First edition published under the title : Blake Studies : Notes on his Life and Work, in Seventeen Chapters (London : Rupert Hart-Davies, 1949).
W.J. Birkbeck and others, eds.—The English Hymnal.—London : Oxford University Press, 1906.
Walter Wilson.—The History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches and Meeting Houses, in London, Westminster, and Southwark : including the Lives of their Ministers, from the Rise of Nonconformity to the Present Time. With an Appendix on the Origin, Progress, and Present State of Christianity in Britain. In four volumes.—London : printed for the Author; sold by W. Button and Son, Paternoster Row; T. Williams and Son, Stationers’ Court; and J. Conder, Bucklersbury, 1808-1814.—R. Edwards, Printer, Crane-Court, Fleet Street.
'Of Moses and his Wife' poem seems perhaps to sum up Bunyan's legal dilemma over his sermons: 'the law its goodness can't bestow,/On any that are wedded there unto'.
ReplyDeleteThis point is made again in the final couplet of the same poem.
Delete