The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 22: Juvenilia and Other PapersStevenson, Robert Louis
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The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 22: Juvenilia and Other Papers
Stevenson, Robert Louis
English literature -- 19th century
I have here before me an edition of the "Pilgrim's Progress," bound in
green, without a date, and described as "illustrated by nearly three
hundred engravings, and memoir of Bunyan." On the outside it is lettered
"Bagster's Illustrated Edition," and after the author's apology, facing
the first page of the tale, a folding pictorial "Plan of the Road" is
marked as "drawn by the late Mr. T. Conder," and engraved by J. Basire.
No further information is anywhere vouchsafed; perhaps the publishers
had judged the work too unimportant; and we are still left ignorant
whether or not we owe the woodcuts in the body of the volume to the same
hand that drew the plan. It seems, however, more than probable. The
literal particularity of mind which, in the map, laid down the
flower-plots in the devil's garden, and carefully introduced the
court-house in the town of Vanity, is closely paralleled in many of the
cuts; and in both, the architecture of the buildings and the disposition
of the gardens have a kindred and entirely English air. Whoever he was,
the author of these wonderful little pictures may lay claim to be the
best illustrator of Bunyan.[43] They are not only good illustrations,
like so many others; but they are like so few, good illustrations of
Bunyan. Their spirit, in defect and quality, is still the same as his
own. The designer also has lain down and dreamed a dream, as literal, as
quaint, and almost as apposite as Bunyan's; and text and pictures
make but the two sides of the same homespun yet impassioned story. To
do justice to the designs, it will be necessary to say, for the
hundredth time, a word or two about the masterpiece which they adorn.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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