On the Left

• Published in: Bunyan studies Vol. 2; no. 1; p. 67
• Main Author: Cunningham, Valentine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.04.1990
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Bunyan, John (1628-88); English literature
• ISSN: 0954-0970

Captain Paul Hobson, it might be, the prophetic tailor from Fairfax's regiment, rising man in the godly party, the radical who helps root out Sir Samuel Luke, commander of Newport Pagnell, and reveal him in his true genteel colours as the kind of Cromwellian who would end up swapping plants with royalist Dorothy Osborne; or Francis 'Elephant' Smith, Baptist printer with a shop at the Elephant and Castle, 'teacher' of a Baptist congregation in Goswell Street, always in and out of jail, lifetime champion of unlicensed publications, Bunyan's printer for seventeen years, 'one of the many unsung heroes of the struggle for freedom of the press in England'. Hill refers with feeling to Professor George Thomson, another thirties Communist, reading the prefatory poem of The Pilgrim's Progress to a Communist Party Conference in the fifties. Hill keeps returning, nibbling, niggling, to Christian's initial abandonment of wife and children and to Bunyan's own guilty absences, in prison, on the road, away from his own family: emblems, of course, of the revolutionary's sacrificial dedication, admirable, even aweing, but still worrying even in its most heroically self-abnegating manifestations among, say, thirties volunteers who abandoned wives and kiddies to go and fight in Spain. In a characteristic flurry he first claims, then disclaims, then claims again, the likelihood suggested by Jack Lindsay, that Bunyan's perpetual fear of being disinherited from the faith as Esau lost his patrimony, was mainly a reaction to his family's sales of land in earlier times and an expression of support for Digger ideas about Englishmen's birthrights.