Pilgrim revisited

Huw Williams | 17:22, Saturday 10 May 2014 | Turin, Italy

The Pilgrim's Progress really doesn't need my recommendation but I would like to make a shout out for this excellent edition by Crossway, edited by C.J.Lovik (and beautifully illustrated by Mike Wimmer.)

In his charming introduction, Lovik highlights the fact that this work which was almost universally known and read by generations of Western Christians has been suddenly neglected and ignored by the last one or two. It's not the Bible of course, but if something has proved so helpful to so many for so long, we need to examine ourselves for the signs of what C.S.Lewis would call 'chronological snobbery'.

Readers wanting to get into this classic book will probably run into the problems I encountered. On the one hand, there are plenty of inexpensive reprints (often from very old editions) of the original published text, which is beautiful in language but not always the most readable to the modern reader. On the other hand, one can stumble across a host of attempts at modernisations of the text, ranging from clumsy to cringe-worthy in my experience.

Which is what made this edition such a welcome read for me – Lovik has made the gentlest of re-touchings to the original text, only making changes where absolutely necessary to clarify archaisms or simplify difficult structures for the modern reader. (All his changes are end-noted for ease of reference and he maintains all the Bible references of the original text.)

The result is an edition which preserves the beauty and spirit of the original text, but giving the modern reader a readable and flowing prose. Beautifully bound and illustrated in a lovely hardback edition, this is an impressive and lovingly created piece of work.

Bunyan purists will still want to stick to an edition with the original text untouched, but if you are looking for something close, with minimal "modernising" and with greater readability, this is well worth the asking price.

A keeper.