Qualla: John Bunyan Museum

John Bunyan Museum: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Simon Speed, Public domain. The iron violin is the thing that stops most visitors. It sits in a case in the John Bunyan Museum in Bedford, looking heavy and unmusical and slightly impossible - a violin-shaped object made out of metal, which on first inspection seems to defy the purpose of being a violin at all. But John Bunyan apparently played it. He made it himself, probably in prison, where wood was scarce and a man might have to improvise with whatever materials a 17th-century jail allowed. There is also a wooden flute he made and played, and a stoneware jug he used during his twelve years of imprisonment, and his last will and testament, and a third edition of The Pilgrim's Progress - the book that, more than any other piece of English prose except possibly the King James Bible, shaped how English-speaking Christians have imagined their faith for the past three and a half centuries. The museum is small. The objects are intimate. The cumulative effect is of standing close to a real person who has been pulled, against his own posthumous preferences, into being a religious monument.

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Image: Simon Speed | Public domain

John Bunyan Museum: A Barn, A Church, A Museum

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Simon Speed, Public domain. The museum sits in the compound of the Bunyan Meeting Free Church on Mill Street in Bedford, in a building that opened in 1998 specifically to house the artefacts that had previously been crammed into a small room in the church itself. The story of the site goes back to 1672, the...

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Image: Simon Speed | Public domain

John Bunyan Museum: The Stoneware Jug and the Prison Years

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gary Houston, CC0. Bunyan's twelve years in Bedford County Jail - 1660 to 1672, with a brief release and rearrest along the way - were the formative ordeal of his life. He was held for refusing to stop preaching without the licence required under the Conventicle Act. The jail itself stood on the br...

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Image: Gary Houston | CC0

John Bunyan Museum: The Book That Wouldn't Stop

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Simon Speed, Public domain. The Pilgrim's Progress was published in 1678, six years after Bunyan's release from prison and ten years before his death. It was an immediate commercial success - selling so well that within a year there was a pirated edition, and within Bunyan's lifetime it went through eleven ...

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Image: Simon Speed | Public domain