The picaresque and the rise of the English novel : Bunyan’s Mr Badman

Abstract

Critical interest in John Bunyan’s The Life and Death of Mr Badman (1680) has mounted in the past decade. Although Mr Badman may defy generic categorisation, John Sutherland’s claim, made some forty years ago, that it could be regarded as the first English novel, remains an intriguing one. Mr Badman forms part of a group of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts that, although one cannot stricto sensu regard them as novels, bear certain features of the genre—e.g., Thomas Deloney’s narratives The Gentle Craft (1597), Jack of Newbury (1597) and Thomas of Reading (ca. 1600), and William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (ca. 1550, published in 1570). As recently as in 2010, in a chapter on Mr Badman in the Cambridge Companion to Bunyan, Stuart Sim has submitted that with Mr Badman “Bunyan reaches out well beyond the formalist school to take his place in the wider tradition of the novel”. In the critical wave of new revisions of Bunyan’s text, it is also imperative to take into consideration the literary context in which Mr Badman was written.