Pilgrim's Progress is set within an allegorical landscape loosely based on 17th-century England, beginning in a City of Destruction that stands in for any community filled with sinful human beings (that is, all of them) and concluding in the Celestial City, or Heaven. The characters progress through a landscape populated not only by other people who sometimes mock, distort, or otherwise reject or oppose the concept of pilgrimage to Heaven, but by supernatural beings like shining angels, deadly fiends, and cruel giants. Characters also encounter features like muddy bogs, pitch-dark valleys, and enchanted paths that symbolize the many discouragements, fears, and other temptations that all Christians are likely to come across in the course of their lives.
The allegorical setting can, of course, be read as corresponding very loosely to the historical world. In Vanity Fair, for example, the infamous Fair contains "the Britain Row, the French Row, the Italian Row, the Spanish Row, the German Row," representing that all the world's nations and cultures have their distinctive "vanities" that ensnare the unwary. Likewise, there are light references to historical events that Bunyan knew his predominantly Protestant readers would catch, as when Christian sees a giant named Pope in the Valley of the Shadow of Death who has grown "so crazy, and stiff in his joints" in his old age that he poses no great threat to pilgrims. (In other words, the Catholic Church and its Pope are obsolete in Bunyan's post-Reformation world.) Even though it isn't the novel's main point, this lightly polemical undertone sheds light on the overall setting, and readers should keep it in mind.
