John Bunyan and Money: Focusing on Life and Death of Mr. Badman

Abstract

Yang-SookShinThis paper presents a socio-historical, economic per se, reading of Life and Death of Mr. Badman. Christopher Hill argues that the work is about a conflict between the traditional morality based on Scripture and the impersonal capitalist or market economy as a powerfully rising force at the time. But taking Mr. Badman as a straightforward embodiment of the then rising capitalistic force, as Hill does, tends to oversimplify Bunyan's relationship with the capitalism of the time as well as the Biblical stance towards capitalism in general. As a more probing reading, this paper focuses on Bunyan's presentation of Mr. Badman as an impossible liar whose unregenerate nature affects almost all of his commercial dealings into something verging on criminal acts. Under the circumstances, Bunyan's or his mouthpiece Mr. Wiseman‘s condemnation of Mr. Badman's business behaviors may well be a condemnation of the latter's criminality than of the contemporary market or capitalist economy. The Biblical stance towards capitalism, which Bunyan incorporates almost word to word into his Mr. Badman, moreover, espouses honest or 'charitable' mode of commercialism based on the solid system of private ownership. Bunyan's repetition in Mr. Badman of such Biblical position concerning the poor and the rich - 'The poor are the sinners while the rich are the righteous, though not without exceptions' - certainly disrupts too facile an argument like Hill's. In his elaborate construction of an evil tradesman of apparent but transient success, Bunyan should be understood as being not against money but against 'evil' - uncharitable or dishonest - ways of acquiring money.