Frequently asked questions about John
the Painter
If John the Painter had a resume,
what would it look like?
Born: 1752, in
Siblings: eleven
Education: six years at an orphans’ school, followed
by five years’ apprenticeship to a house painter
Travel:
Major accomplishments: burned down the rope house in
the
Work experience: journeyman painter, highwayman,
indentured servant, burglar
Favorite author: Voltaire; also reads Benjamin
Franklin and Richard Price
Appearance: five feet seven inches, with a
thin face, reddish hair, and freckles
Marital status: single
In your title, you call John the
Painter a terrorist. But in the book itself, you make no comparisons at all.
Why didn’t you say more?
I gave this one a lot of thought.
But in the end, I decided against saying anything explicit. Here’s why: first
and foremost, readers like to think for themselves. They don’t want to be hit
over the head with heavy-handed parallels between the past and present. But
there were personal reasons, too. I’m not one of those academics who believes that if you can understand why certain people do
horrible things you can excuse them. That’s not for me. Terrorists make me
squeamish. They hate women and they hate critical thinking, and as a woman who
writes, I take that personally. So you can say that the topic made me so
uncomfortable that I didn’t want to write about it, at least not directly. But
at the same time, there are analogies, and I took care to place them
within easy grasp.
So what are the analogies?
First you have to have a
superpower that everyone hates. And that’s the position that
Then you’ve got a guy who’s got a
good education and no prospects. And he’s a foreigner who will never be
accepted. (John the Painter
was a Scot, and wherever he traveled, people made fun of him.) In
his fantasy self, he’s an officer and a hero, but that’s not what other people
see. He’s not stupid; he likes to read; and yet he’s not going to get ahead or
be recognized. He wants people to notice him. He latches onto an older man, in
this case Silas Deane, the American envoy to the court of Versailles. Think of
all the deranged young men who idolize Bin Laden and you get the picture. But
most of all, he’s a sociopath. I say this because he was perfectly willing to
burn down the lodging houses where he rented rooms. These were people of his
own class, and yet he had no feeling at all for them.
Which terrorist do you think John
the Painter resembles the most?
No doubt about it: Richard Reid,
the shoe-bomber. Neither, thank god, succeeded, and both stood out like sore
thumbs. Reid had a ridiculous accent, and poor John
the Painter was a stammerer.
What kind of painter was he?
An ordinary
house-painter.
And that’s the whole point, really: this is not your usual biography. It’s not
about a lord or a lady or a general or a writer. It’s about an ordinary man. I
wanted to show what it was like to live in the eighteenth century, not in a
mansion or on a plantation, but in a lodging house where you have to share a
room with someone every bit as poor as yourself. So behind the scenes, there’s
actually a lot of social history holding the narrative together, that and the
stories of men and women whose lives paralleled John the Painter’s–unemployed
journeymen, common thieves, indentured servants, men and women waiting to hang.
We can’t even begin to imagine what they endured.
Are you a Marxist?
No. Nor was John the Painter. I’ve
already mentioned his complete lack of empathy with members of his own class.
He was not one of E.P. Thompson’s working-class radicals. On
the contrary. He rejected their values of thrift and self-discipline. He
had no compunction about setting fires in the rundown lodging houses that
catered to the men and women of his own class. His values, to the extent that
they can be categorized, were those of his masters. He did not want to better
the lot of the working poor; he wanted to get as far away from them as
possible. He wanted to be an officer, not a soldier.
Did you feel sorry for John the
Painter?
Much more than I thought I would.
Mostly I found myself bristling at just how horrible his society was to him and
people like him. It gave him choices, but it neglected to give him options.
This was true even of the stellar education that he received. His lessons
prepared him for a world that no longer existed, a
world in which journeymen who worked long and hard might hope to become masters
and respected members of the community. Without the right social connections,
his education and talents meant nothing. He felt cheated because he was.
And really, what were his
alternatives? Had he stayed on the straight and narrow, he doubtless would have
lived much longer, long enough to see and perhaps work in the factories of the
future, but he would have spent those years in poverty, an obscure and unwanted
man, too poor to marry, let alone set up a shop of his own.
You almost have to admire the
man. He tried not once but repeatedly to transcend his destiny. This was the
driving force behind each of the choices that he made. He moved to