How Middlemarch drew on The Pilgrim's Progress
A documented line of influence: George Eliot demonstrably engaged John Bunyan’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Pilgrim's Progress
John Bunyan · 1678
EnlightenmentThe influenced
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 1872
The Age of the NovelRelevance
6/10
On Middlemarch’s page
- Eliot heads Chapter 85 of Middlemarch with Bunyan — the trial of Faithful, lifted straight from Vanity Fair
- The Pilgrim's Progress was the book of her Midlands girlhood, and she kept this epigraph when she cut others, so it's no idle ornament
- Reading Bunyan first lets you hear what Eliot is doing: setting a worldly courtroom against the Protestant allegory of a soul on trial
On The Pilgrim's Progress’s page
- The Protestant text of Eliot's Midlands childhood, surfacing in her greatest novel a century and a half later
- She quotes the trial of Faithful from Bunyan's Vanity Fair as the epigraph to Middlemarch Chapter 85 — one of the few she kept when she pruned the rest in later editions
- A deliberate reach back to The Pilgrim's Progress to frame a moment of judgment and worldly disgrace