{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.023297491039426525, 'fraction_numerical': 0.006571087216248507, 'mean_word_length': 5.296992481203008, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Vanity Fair and the Celestial City

In John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the pilgrims cannot reach the Celestial City without passing through Vanity Fair, where everything is bought and sold. In recent years there has been much analysis of commerce and consumption in Britain during the long eighteenth century, and of the dramatic expansion of popular publishing. Similarly, much has been written on the extraordinary effects of the evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century in Britain, Europe, and North America. But how did popular religious culture and the world of print interact? What religious books were read, and how? Who chose them? How did they get into people’s hands? This study attempts to answer these questions in detail. It explores the works written, edited, abridged, and promoted by Protestant dissenters, Methodists both Arminian and Calvinist, and Church of England evangelicals in the period 1720 to 1800, while also looking back to seventeenth-century and earlier sources and forward to republication and dissemination up to the nineteenth century. Part I is concerned with the publishing and distribution of religious books by commercial booksellers and religious societies, and the means by which readers obtained them and how they responded to what they read. Part II shows that some of the most important publications were new versions of earlier nonconformist, episcopalian, Roman Catholic, and North American works. Part III explores the main literary kinds, including annotated Bibles, devotional guides, exemplary lives, and hymns. The book discusses c.200 writers and provides detailed case studies of popular and influential works.