8 - A Book for Boys and Girls

Summary

A Book for Boys and Girls may be viewed, from one modern perspective, as the culmination of Bunyan's attempts to use his abilities as a writer to appeal to, engage, and encourage an everwider and more diverse, readership to seek salvation. It has, however, attracted the least critical attention of all his literary works. This is, in large part, because it was addressed, not only but directly, to children. One Bunyan scholar who has written about it notes that Bunyan's best-known impact on the history of children's literature is as the author of The Pilgrim's Progress and, as the next chapter will show, the allegory became a Sunday school staple in the centuries following the death of the author. Yet it is this last literary work to be published, in 1686, before his death that Bunyan explicitly wrote for children, as well as adults, and it deserves attention both as a contribution to writing for children and, I would argue, as the culmination of his own approach to the role of writing in pastoral work. It also exemplifies many of the characteristics that distinguish Bunyan's writing as a whole: his commitment to, and skill in, appealing to his readers with images and metaphors they will understand; his use of older, popular literary and cultural forms and traditions in the service of reaching new readers; and the ever-present challenge of encouraging attentive, rather than indulgent or wayward, reading.

Here Bunyan returns to the foundation of his Nonconformist Christian faith's attitude to the role of reading in each human being's search for salvation; personal, attentive reading of Scripture is at the core of Protestant and Nonconformist belief and in A Book for Boys and Girls: Or, Country Rhimes for Children Bunyan adopts a twofold strategy to helping spread the reading of the Word. The main body of the text comprises seventy-four poems, of varying lengths, that encourage readers to see examples of the work of God in the ordinary, everyday things they would see in the world around them. Fish and ants, spiders and dung heaps all feature in poems that may, in many cases lack technical precision, and rarely match Bunyan's energetic grace in prose, but have a charm and immediacy that endures.