Little Women: chapter titles from The Pilgrim's Progress
Published
Where Alcott's chapter titles meet The Pilgrim's Progress
The book has 47 chapters in two parts. Chapter 1 is Playing Pilgrims; chapters 6 to 9 are Beth Finds the Palace Beautiful, Amy's Valley of Humiliation, Jo Meets Apollyon and Meg Goes to Vanity Fair; chapter 17 is Little Faithful. Apollyon, Faithful, Palace Beautiful, the Valley of Humiliation and Vanity Fair are names from John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Nataša Ninčetović (2024) notes. The book is 186,034 words, counted by Scrin for this page in October 2026, in the Project Gutenberg plain-text edition, #514, from the ebook's start marker to its end marker, so everything before chapter one is included, 222 words; a chapter's length runs from its heading to the next heading, from 1,915 words, chapter 44, to 7,283, chapter 12; a word is a segment that Unicode word segmentation (UAX #29) marks as word-like, except that a hyphen between two letters or digits does not split it, so a hyphenated word counts once. The first part, chapters 1 to 23, is 88,021 words; the second, chapters 24 to 47 with the sentence that opens it, 97,791.
Searched in the plain text chapter by chapter, capitals ignored, words beginning with pilgrim (pilgrim, pilgrims, pilgrimage, and Pilgrim in the title of Bunyan's book) occur 13 times inside the chapters, chapter titles not counted, in 7 chapters: 1, 2, 4, 13, 19 and 22 in the first part, and 40, The Valley of the Shadow, in the second. The 40 other chapters never print one, 87% of the book's words. Drawn as one bar per chapter, the 7 chapters that print it marked, 6 of the marks fall in the first part.
Illustration drawn from the chapter lengths, in words, counted for this page, October 2026, in Project Gutenberg #514, a chapter's length being its words from its heading to the next; the chapters that print a word beginning with pilgrim, found the same way; the borrowing from Bunyan after Nataša V. Ninčetović (2024). Not a Scrin screen.
What it offers someone writing now
A novel can borrow the map of an older book and let its chapter titles name the stations. Ninčetović (2024) writes that “numerous chapters are named after the characters and well-known places from Bunyan's allegory”. List a manuscript's chapter titles, mark those that name a station of the story it borrows from, then search the chapters for that story's key word: where the marked titles and the word stop shows how far the borrowed map carries the book.
The analysis behind it
Nataša V. Ninčetović (University of Priština in Kosovska Mitrovica), “Unconventional Religion of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women”, Collection of Papers of the Faculty of Philosophy 54:3 (2024): “numerous chapters are named after the characters and well-known places from Bunyan's allegory”. https://scindeks-clanci.ceon.rs/data/pdf/0354-3293/2024/0354-32932403173N.pdf
The text: Project Gutenberg #514.
See your own manuscript this way
Scrin is a home where pages grow into books: you keep writing, from an untitled line to a chapter, and Scrin keeps the rest.
Import a manuscript and Scrin gives it back as a book you can read differently: its plan, the length of every chapter, and what keeps coming back.