The Incendiary: The Misadventures of John the Painter, First Modern Terrorist (review)

James Aitken (1752–77), a Scot better known as 'John the Painter,' achieved a brief notoriety for his attempts to burn down Britain's six royal dockyards in 1776–77 in support of the American revolutionary war. An unlucky and not particularly competent arsonist, he managed to do no more than set fire to the ropehouse in Portsmouth, although he did put the commercial port of Bristol in fear by lighting fires along the waterfront that caused greater damage. Substantial rewards were offered for his capture and Aitken was soon tried and executed for his crimes. The progress of the war then diverted public attention from his exploits, and he was largely forgotten. In The Incendiary Jessica Warner has rescued him from the obscurity he so loathed.

Warner's biography is in part a work of imaginative reconstruction: when Aitken 'vanishes from sight,' she draws on social history and accounts written by contemporaries to fill in the gaps. But The Incendiary is not merely biography. Aitken's story – the picaresque adventures of an anti-hero, a failure – is an interesting one, but in the course of telling it Warner also offers those unfamiliar with eighteenth-century life or criminal justice history a glimpse into a different world, introducing her readers to policing, trial, and punishment, as well as the life of the labouring classes, at the time of the American Revolution.

Precisely why Aitken was drawn to the American cause is unknown. Warner casts him as a 'Romantic revolutionary,' a figure who united Enlightenment ideas with a Romantic determination to refashion them 'in his own image.' In the title of her book he is also identified as the 'first modern terrorist,' but this seems little more than a marketing ploy. There is no sustained engagement with the issue of terrorism in her text, nor does Warner attempt to substantiate the claim that Aitken was first in the field.

If the terrorist link seems contrived, The Incendiary succeeds in revealing the frustrated ambitions of someone born into the ranks of the poor who glimpsed, through books, another, more desirable world to which he was denied entry. Aitken was educated at Heriot's Hospital in Edinburgh, where he acquired a love of books; but at age fourteen the school authorities decided that he had not distinguished himself sufficiently to be sent on to university. He was instead apprenticed to a house painter, an occupation that consigned him not merely to intellectual boredom but to continued poverty, ill health (most painters succumbed to lead poisoning), and an early death. Warner compares Aitken to Jude the Obscure; I was reminded of a nineteenth-century criminal, Hilda Blake. Gender and geography divide their experience: Blake, a Norfolk working-class orphan fostered in Manitoba, murdered her mistress in the hope of assuming her place as wife and mother rather than attempting to burn down towns; Blake's reading material consisted of nineteenth-century romantic novels rather than Enlightenment philosophers and political tracts. But like Aitken she was restless and dissatisfied with her lot; she too craved attention and resorted to force to achieve it, and like Aitken she was hanged. No one would help me, Blake raged in an autobiographical poem written while she was in prison. Nor had anyone helped Aitken. He was never able to earn a living as a painter and always had to supplement his income by theft. His consistent attempts to dress above his station earned only mockery. He longed to become a commissioned officer, but a commission was out of the question for someone of his social status. Aitken was 'an ordinary man, and a poorly behaved one at that.' Yet in Warner's version of his life he also epitomizes the wasted potential and blighted hopes of so many of his class.

The Incendiary was written for the general public rather than an academic or specialist audience, and it suffers from minor but unnecessary repetition of information (often in...