Fiction · 1680
Life and Death of Mr. Badman
Mr Wiseman meets Mr Attentive on the road and tells him that Mr Badman has died, and the two of them walk through his life from beginning to end. He lied as a child, stole from his master, ruined a pious woman by courting her for her money and then breaking her heart, defrauded his creditors twice by a deliberate bankruptcy, drank, whored, beat his wife, and died quietly in his bed without a struggle — which is the point Wiseman keeps returning to, since a comfortable death is exactly what the book will not allow the reader to take for reassurance.
John Bunyan published The Life and Death of Mr Badman in 1680, between the two parts of The Pilgrim's Progress, and meant it as a companion and an opposite: not an allegory but a plain account of an ordinary Englishman damning himself through ordinary trade and domestic cruelty. It is an unusually direct record of how business was actually done in Restoration England.
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About the author
1628–1688 · 17th Century
John Bunyan (1628–1688) was born in Elstow, near Bedford, the son of a tinker, and served briefly in the Parliamentary army during the Civil War before returning home to take up his father's trade. He joined a nonconformist congregation in Bedford in 1653 and began preaching in 1657; after the Restoration made unlicensed preaching illegal, he was arrested in 1660 and spent some twelve years in Bedford gaol, refusing repeated offers of release in exchange for a promise to stop. He wrote Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, his own spiritual autobiography, during this imprisonment, publishing it in 1666; a second, shorter spell in gaol in 1676–77 produced The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), the allegory of Christian's journey to the Celestial City that became one of the most widely read books in the English language. He died in London in 1688.
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