Life and Death of Mr. Badman

From the opening

The Life and Death of Mr Badman was published by John Bunyan in 1680, two years after the First Edition of the First Part of The Pilgrim’s Progress. In the opening sentence of his preface he tells us it was intended by him as the counterpart or companion picture to the Allegory. But whatever his own intentions may have been, the Public of his own time seem to have declined to accept the book in this capacity. Indeed, another writer, who signs himself T. S., undertook to complete Bunyan’s Allegory for him, in a book in size and type closely resembling it, and entitled The Second Part of the Pilgrim’s Progress . . . exactly Described under the Similitude of a Dream. It was printed for Jho. Malthus at the Sun in the Poultry, and published in 1683. So far as is known, only one copy of this book is now in existence, the copy which was formerly in the library of the poet Southey and now in that of the Baptist Union. Upon this Bunyan seems to have changed his purpose, so far as The Life and Death of Mr Badman was concerned, and on the first of January, 1685, published the story of Christiana and her Children as his own Second Part of The Pilgrim’s Progress.

The work before us, therefore, now stands apart by itself. In its composition Bunyan seems to have been greatly influenced, so far as form is concerned, by a book which his wife brought with her on her marriage, and which, as he tells us in his Grace Abounding, they read together. It was entitled The Plaine Man’s Pathway to Heaven: By Arthur Dent, Preacher of the Word of God at South Shoobury in Essex. The eleventh impression, the earliest now known, is dated 1609. Both books are in dialogue form, and in each case the dialogue is supposed to be carried on through one long day.

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