In his preface titled "The Author to the Reader," Bunyan announces that Mr Badman is a pseudonym for a real man who is dead.
Mr Badman's relatives and offspring continue to populate Earth, which "reels and staggereth to and fro like a Drunkard, the transgression thereof is heavy upon it."
In a mock eulogy, Bunyan says Mr Badman did not earn four themes commonly part of a funeral for a great man.
He said he published it to address the wickedness and debauchery that had corrupted England, as was his duty as a Christian, in hopes of delivering himself "from the ruins of them that perish."
[3] John Brown of Bedford came out with a version for Cambridge University Press in 1905 that included Bunyan's The Holy War.