golden gates into the city of God, so in this later work his purpose was
to depict the career of a man whose face from the first was turned in the
opposite direction, going on from bad to worse, ever becoming more and
more irretrievably evil, fitter and fitter for the bottomless pit; his
life full of sin and his death without repentance; reaping the fruit of
his sins in hopeless sinfulness. That this was the original purpose of
the work, Bunyan tells us in his preface. It came into his mind, he
says, as in the former book he had written concerning the progress of the
Pilgrim from this world to glory, so in this second book to write of the
life and death of the ungodly, and of their travel from this world to
hell. The new work, however, as in almost every respect it differs from
the earlier one, so it is decidedly inferior to it. It is totally unlike
"The Pilgrim's Progress" both in form and execution. The one is an
allegory, the other a tale, describing without imagery or metaphor, in
the plainest language, the career of a "vulgar, middle-class,
unprincipled scoundrel." While "The Pilgrim's Progress" pursues the
narrative form throughout, only interrupted by dialogues between the
leading characters, "Mr. Badman's career" is presented to the world in a
dialogue between a certain Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive. Mr. Wiseman
tells the story, and Mr. Attentive supplies appropriate reflections on
it. The narrative is needlessly burdened with a succession of short
sermons, in the form of didactic discourses on lying, stealing, impurity,
and the other vices of which the hero of the story was guilty, and which
brought him to his miserable end. The plainness of speech with which
some of these evil doings are enlarged upon, and Mr. Badman's indulgence
in them described, makes portions of the book very disagreeable, and
indeed hardly profitable reading. With omissions, however, the book well
deserves perusal, as a picture such as only Bunyan or his rival in
lifelike portraiture, Defoe, could have drawn of vulgar English life in
the latter part of the seventeenth century, in a commonplace country town