Toronto-based academic and writer Jessica Warner has written a fine story about an eccentric subject: an unsuccessful anti-British insurgent during the American Revolution. John Aitken, aka John the Painter, was born the son of a smith in Edinburgh in 1752. He was briefly educated, barely fed, and apprenticed as a painter (houses, not portraits), a declining and unfortunate trade for any young man, particularly one with aspirations. Without steady work, Aitken became a day labourer and minor criminal, moving about England, then briefly to America, and then back, working odd jobs and thieving to get by.

He was restless, smarter than his education or appearance would suggest, underemployed and resentful when, probably seeking glory, perhaps wealth, he decided to take up arms against Britain. Though he set out to burn all of England’s dockyards, he would fail to cripple even one. He was caught and hanged, and save for a few months in 1777, lived and died in obscurity.

For all Aitken’s shortcomings and failures, Warner’s empathy for her subject is clear. She deftly stresses both the cruelty and normalcy of Aitken’s life, and has a talent for contextualizing and making the strange familiar. The book is also a rich social history, wallowing in the decrepit conditions of the times: the wormy food, filthy slums, and cruel justice. Warner’s prose is straightforward and steadfast. Beyond her expert storytelling, the restrained commentary offers rich period detail, minor quarrels with other historians, and a few passages of very welcome and trenchant insight.

Here’s Warner on Aitken’s desire to cripple the Royal Navy, and his dream of a hero’s welcome in America: “It is not the wish of a republican; it is the wish of an elitist, of a man who wishes to be at the top of the social hierarchy and not at its bottom. The man in the shabby brown coat does not hate the ancien régime; he loves it all too well.”

Several well-placed photographs complement the text, as do the extensive notes and an index. But scholarship aside, John the Painter’s life is a great story. The Incendiary is an accomplished balance between research and storytelling, fact-finding and original thought, and pays an immense tribute to its poor, peculiar subject.