The Pilgrim's Progress

Bunyan's allegory maps a soul's journey, not a country: Christian walks from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City through named virtues and dangers. There is no literal geography to plot, but he wrote it in Bedford gaol, and local tradition has long tied its landmarks to the real Bedfordshire he knew.

Christian

Elstow, the City of Destruction

The setting out

Christian starts the book at home in the City of Destruction, a burden on his back, reading that his town is condemned, and he runs from it with his fingers in his ears. The whole journey is the flight from this first place toward salvation. Bunyan's own first place was Elstow, the village where he grew up and first felt the terrors the book dramatises.

The setting out

inspired by The City of Destruction is a place in the allegory, not on any map; the geography of the book is spiritual. Bunyan was born and raised in Elstow, just south of Bedford, and local tradition reads the doomed home-city Christian flees as drawn from the ordinary village world he left. Anchored to Bunyan's real Bedfordshire.

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