To tape or not to tape. For informal sit-down interviews, it can be a tricky question. Novelists often seem to dislike having their conversations recorded – presumably they’d rather be free of the temptation to constantly rewind what they’ve just said. Musicians are all too happy to be taped. Some can barely refrain from leaning in to twiddle with the dials or check the battery level.

Academics are usually fine with the tape, too, though out of reverence for data rather than the magic of sound. “Please do use it,” says Toronto academic and author Jessica Warner. “I find that otherwise some journalists just tend to make up half the quotes on their own. It can sometimes make you sound smarter than you really are, but I still prefer it the other way.”

On a dreary spring day at the tail end of March, we are sitting at a coffee shop on Spadina Avenue, just up the street from Warner’s office, discussing her new book. Published by McClelland & Stewart, The Incendiary: The Misadventures of John the Painter, First Modern Terrorist tells the story of an obscure young British tradesman and petty criminal who became briefly infamous for trying to burn down all of England’s dockyards, believing that this would make him a hero of the American War of Independence.

Not surprisingly, the scheme was a flop – a few warehouses were partly torched, a ship mildly damaged. Nobody was hurt in the fiasco besides John, who was quickly captured, tried, and hanged, his corpse left to rot on a gibbet outside Portsmouth as a warning to other would-be revolutionaries.

Despite its obviously lurid aspects, the story is as much about the daily lives of poor people in the 18th century as it is about proto-terrorism. “This is in many ways an 18th-century everyman,” says the 49-year-old Warner. “He does some extraordinary things, but most of his life is astonishingly average. So it really is what it’s like to be ordinary in the 18th century.”

A native of Washington, D.C., Warner currently works as a researcher into the history of drugs and alcohol with the University of Toronto and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. She has the air of an old school, plain-talking American progressive who’s quick to speak her mind – though she leavens her diatribes with an ironic twinkle in the eye. Bemoaning the ascendancy of George W. Bush within a couple of minutes of sitting down, she’s equally contemptuous of the leftish intellectual fads that have overtaken the humanities in recent years.

“I despise contemporary academic writing. There’s no excuse for it,” she says, quickly getting fired up for a good-humoured rant. “This is not mathematics, this is not physics. Anything in the humanities should be accessible to reasonably intelligent readers. There is no reason why it has to have a lot of jargon or needs words like gender or deconstruction. You don’t need to cite Foucault to make a point.”

In this regard, she’s proud of her first book, 2003’s Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason (published originally in the U.S. by Four Walls Eight Windows). Written in an accessible and rollicking style, it describes how the potent potable became a key form of escape among the English lower classes in 18th-century London, at a time of social upheaval and brutal poverty. The government responded with harsh laws, networks of informers, and punitive tax regimes – whose proceeds, bizarrely, helped fund Britain’s exercises in overseas empire building.

The book garnered excellent reviews, in both North America and Britain, and has since been adopted by several universities as a text used in first-year Western Civilization courses. “Probably in part because there’s lots of sex in it, and the professors are looking to entice their undergraduates with that aspect,” Warner admits.

Craze also led her, albeit indirectly, to her new book, thanks to a side trip to Portsmouth, England, in search of evidence of gin mania in the provinces. “I didn’t find much evidence of gin drinking, but the archivist kept telling me about the story of John the Painter,” she says. “I finally took the hint.”

Warner frequently uses the word picaresque when describing what she was aiming for in The Incendiary, and it’s true that John the Painter’s brief life story has certain Henry Fielding-esque undertones. (Oddly enough, the justice of the peace who handled John’s treason trial was one Sir John Fielding, Henry’s corrupt and creepy half-brother.)

Born in Edinburgh in 1752, John the Painter – his given name was James Aitken – received a surprisingly decent basic education at an orphanage school. But passed over for promotion to university, he was subsequently apprenticed as an old-fashioned painter/mixer, a job that offered roughly the career prospects open to a bright young typewriter repair specialist in today’s digital economy.

Wandering around Britain in search of work, he fell into an aimless life of mischief, violence, and petty crime. He did little better during a brief spell as an indentured servant in America (he quickly ran away from his bosses and returned to England), but after the war broke out, the 23-year-old ruffian identified with the rebellious states with surprising passion.


Warner’s major at university was medieval history. She received a bachelor’s degree from Princeton in the late 1970s, and eventually went on to earn a PhD from Yale in 1991, at which point she realized that a doctorate in medieval history gave her roughly the job prospects of a young typewriter repair specialist.

Through a friend, she heard about a two-year post-doctoral position with UC Berkeley’s Alcohol Research group. She applied, was accepted, and – in one of those somewhat arbitrary changes in focus that mark many academic careers – found herself working in a completely new field. Since then, she’s published numerous articles on subjects ranging from the history of temperance movements to the use of marijuana among high school students. She has been at her current position as a researcher with U of T and CAMH since 1995.

As for the medieval history training, Warner says it came in unexpectedly handy when she was writing The Incendiary. “Eighteenth-century historians are used to having a wealth of information,” she says. “Here I have a biography of a guy with scanty facts, so the medievalist in me looked more closely at each of those facts.” Aitken liked to wear his hair long, for instance, in a style popular among poets – clearly, he fancied himself as something of a romantic figure. And, such as he could afford, he dressed above his station whenever possible.

His pretensions to glory and upward mobility, of course, got him nowhere. “The thing that really astonished me was this kind of existential quality to his life,” says the author. “He had in a way utter freedom – hours of freedom to do nothing with his life. It’s really an existential dilemma to have complete freedom and no opportunity. I think that’s true to an extent about every young man and to a lesser extent of every young woman in his social class at that time.”

At the time Aitken lived, she adds, large numbers of educated tradespeople were becoming obsolete, replaced by new technologies (easy to use pre-mixed paints in John the Painter’s case), and overqualified to work in the factories and sweatshops that were beginning to emerge with the coming of the industrial revolution.

“It was a calamitous time and to a certain extent it’s analogous to what you might see in the Arab world today, in that you have a huge, very young population,” Warner argues. “For example, in Saudi Arabia or Iran the young people are getting good educations and have zero prospects.”

If it’s an analogy that makes intuitive sense, it is not made anywhere in the book, which in fact scrupulously avoids any reference to our own unsettled era. “My basic approach was to place the analogies within easy grasp, but not to draw them explicitly,” Warner says. “I think readers can probably do that themselves. It’s a very uncomfortable issue – I don’t feel like rationalizing away either.”

This is, no doubt, also a consequence of Warner’s obvious affection for her subject. She says her first reaction to John’s story was to see him as a loser, but that she changed her mind once she began her research. “I very quickly felt a lot of admiration for him. Ultimately I wrote a book that was far more sympathetic to him than I would have predicted. Certainly the conditions that he faced were insurmountable and tragic.”

The same cannot be said for most of the peripheral players in Aitken’s saga: newspaper hacks that make their contemporary cohorts at Fox News seem noble by comparison, and justices of the peace named Fielding who saw no conflict in selling prisoners’ confessions – elicited through deception or torture – for their own personal profit.

Currently, Warner is about a third of the way through her next book, a history of sexual abstinence movements, mostly in the U.S., tentatively titled Pleasure’s Enemies: The Pursuit of Purity in a Land of Excess. She says the book is intended as a serious, somewhat more traditional, work of cultural history than The Incendiary.

Meanwhile, she has been following The Incendiary’s reception in its various markets with growing interest. In the U.K. (where the book was released by Profile Books under the title John the Painter) and Canada, reviews have been largely positive, and readers have appreciated the book as a somewhat offbeat everyman story. By contrast, in the U.S., where the 312-page book is published by Thunder’s Mouth Press, it hasn’t quite found its market. “In the U.S. right now the emphasis in non-fiction is on these gargantuan comfort food books,” Warner says, that patented pre-harangue twinkle reappearing in her eye.

“If you’re going to do a biography it’s going to be Bill Clinton’s autobiography or it’s going to be the third biography this year of Thomas Jefferson, books to make people feel good without breaking new ground. There’s almost a Texas quality to the books that many Americans want. It’s almost like they’ve got their Humvee of a book.”