Extra-illustrating the road

This article assesses the prototypes of the maps that accompanied John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, their uses and functions in the books in which they appeared, as well as their impact on the reading and interpretation of the text. It analyses these maps while taking into account the illustrators’, the publishers’ and the readers’ perspectives. In doing so, it questions the nature of the interaction between these extra, global images of the journey and their initial, local textual counterparts as well as their more traditional illustrations. It posits that these maps are, in some ways, extra-illustrations – not only of a canonical work but also of earlier illustrations of that text. They are publishers’ rather than readers’ add-ons to the book, the literary work and its iconographic corpus, and yet they constitute interesting cases of ‘modern’ extra-illustration that invite us to rethink the very concept. This article also shows how these maps were re-appropriated in recent iconographic interpretations of Bunyan’s allegory, notably by children taking part in drawing contests, digital artists reinterpreting Christian’s journey, and firms commercializing prints and games based on Bunyan’s text. These latter creations provide examples of what could be called ‘extra illustrations of extra illustrations’ and therefore allow us to assess the process that leads from one type to another, and the chain of descent that binds them in spite of their historical, material and functional distinctions.