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Published in final edited form as:
Hist Psychiatry. 2010 December ; 21(84 0 4): 387–405.
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From stack-firing to pyromania: medico-legal concepts of insane

arson in British, US and European contexts, c.1800–1913. Part 2
Jonathan Andrews
Newcastle University

Abstract
The second part of this paper1 explores deepening doubts about pyromania as a special insanity,
British debates post-1890, and pyromania’s supplanting with the broader diagnostic category of
insane incendiarism. It assesses the conceptual importance of revenge and morbid-motivations for
arson, and the relationship of Victorian and Edwardian concepts of arson to more modern
psychiatric research. The main objective is to ascertain the extent to which Victorian and
Edwardian medico-psychologists and medical legists arrived at meaningful and workable
definitions of criminal insanity linked to arson. It concludes by emphasizing the limitations,
contentiousness and inconsistencies in the use of technical terms such as ‘pyromania’, contrasted
with the qualified success of authorities in arriving at more viable and broadly acceptable
explanations of insane firesetting.

Keywords
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Arson; firesetting; incendiarism; instinctive insanity; irresistible impulse; kleptomania;

monomania; moral insanity; motive; partial insanity; puberty; pyromania; sexual

Deepening doubts about pyromania as a special or distinct insanity

Post-1850, British, European and US medico-legal authorities were often quite significantly
divided over the applicability and essential properties of pyromania, and the extent to which
they accepted (like Esquirol and Ray) that pyromania was a distinct disorder. A number
preferred to classify it subsumed within more general definitions of mental derangement.
While signalling partial acceptance of pyromania as ‘a supposed species of moral insanity,
believed to actuate incendiaries’, Robert Grey Mayne’s 1860 Lexicon, for example, signified
the merely putative status of such definitions. Emphasizing that pyromania’s ‘existence … is
by some denied’, Mayne defined kleptomania in the same terms and dipsomania as a ‘vice’
rather than a ‘disease’ (Mayne, 1860: 559, 1054).2 In later editions of this text, pyromania
remained a merely ‘supposed species of moral insanity’, while by contrast dipsomania was

1Part 1 was published in History of Psychiatry 21 (3): 243–260.

© The Author(s) 2010
Corresponding author: Jonathan Andrews, School of Historical Studies & Northern Centre for the History of Medicine, Newcastle
University, Armstrong Building, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK. jonathan.andrews@ncl.ac.uk.
2Mayne (1860: 278) reserved particular disdain for dipsomania, dismissed as a ‘vice [and] … old term for an unconquerable desire for
spirituous liquors, regarded as a disease’. He was less sceptical in his assessments of nymphomania, erotomania and ‘oenomania’; pp.
318, 799, 972.
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readily deemed ‘a disease’, and kleptomania was, contrariwise, newly glossed as ‘a now
recognised species of moral insanity, actuating the subject of it to pilfer and steal’ (e.g.
Mayne, 1889: 121, 218, 365). Although some texts continued to present pyromania as a
species of impulsive ‘insanity, with an irresistible desire to destroy by fire’ (e.g. Cleaveland,
1872: 202; Fowler, 1875: 420),3 by the 1880s and 1890s medical lexicons were registering
pyromania’s claim for special status as just a ‘claim’, according it cursory treatment and
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often eschewing reference to irresistible impulse. Richard Quain’s medical dictionary was
categorical that pyromania’s ‘claim to be regarded as a special form of insanity has not been
established’ (Quain, 1890, Vol. 2: 314).4 Vice versa, dipsomania and kleptomania were not
uncommonly recognized with larger entries and as definitive forms of insanity, the latter
generally linked to irresistible impulse and/or to underlying congenital, organic disease (e.g.
Sydenham Society, 1899, Vol. 3: v). Of course, such lexicographic texts were rarely
compiled by medico-legal experts, and can only be seen as limited reflections of the
complexities and shifts in the more detailed debates in specialist literature. The studies by
Whitlock (1999) and by Abelson (1989) make it clear that kleptomania remained a
controversial diagnosis and insanity defence. But the majority of later nineteenth-century
Anglo-American medical jurisprudence and medico-psychological texts on crime and
insanity repeatedly and emphatically questioned the legitimacy of pyromania. Likewise they
were only partially successful, and indeed committed, in arguing for the expansion of the
insanity defence in cases of incendiarism.

Indeed, following in particular Wilhelm Griesinger’s (1867: 269–71) dismissal of

‘pyromania’ (and other symptom-led nosologies of insanity) as a ‘purely artificial
classification’, many European and US specialists were chary about using the term,
particularly in diagnostic practice. While Jonathan Martin’s arson had plainly helped to
furnish a more serviceable test case for specialists seeking to demonstrate that arson might
spring from prevailing hallucinations/delusions, many were unconvinced about validating
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‘pyromania’ as a workable diagnosis or insanity defence; Griesinger (1867: 271) criticized

Phillipe Pinel’s denomination of Martin’s case under ‘pyromania’ as ‘the necessary but evil
result of a superficial classification’. Although Griesinger found fire-raising cases ‘most
interesting’, devoting three pages of his influential Mental Pathology to the subject, they
were subsumed within a broader section on the morbid impulses and inclinations of
melancholia. Parting company with Pinel and Esquirol, who had classified pyromania as a
monomania, Griesinger rejected either monomania or morbid impulse as sufficiently
explicatory of the pathology. He appealed for doing ‘away with the term, Pyromania’, and
substituting classifications based on deeper investigation of underlying causes: ‘Let there be
a careful investigation in every case into the individual psychological peculiarities which lie
at the bottom and give rise to the impulse’ (Griesinger, 1867: 270).

3Fowler (1875: 272) designated kleptomania in kindred terms. Cleaveland’s (1872: 202) rather minimalist pocket-guide defined
pyromania an ‘irresistible propensity to destroy by fire, a species of insanity’, and dipsomania as merely ‘thirst of drunkards’, omitting
kleptomania altogether.
4By contrast kleptomania was straightforwardly recorded as ‘insanity characterized by an irresistible impulse to steal’; Quain, 1890,
Vol. 1: 798. Neither George Fielding Blanford’s extensive entries on ‘impulsive insanity’ and ‘moral insanity’, nor John Sibbald’s on
‘legal insanity’ and ‘criminal responsibility’, made any reference to pyromania/arson, and very little to kleptomania, focusing much
more on homicidal insanity; pp. 315–18, 725–8.

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Griesinger’s approach was evidently indebted to Casper (1846; 1864) and moreover to
Willers Jessen’s (1860) monograph on firesetting. Jessen, complaining of the insufficiency
of attention to pyromania in the existing literature, had adopted a case-by-case analysis,
applying broader diagnostic nosologies of insanity (including melancholia). Although
somewhat German-centric in its analytical scope, ignoring other continental and
Anglophone surveys, Jessen’s monograph was widely recognized by contemporary
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reviewers as the most definitive survey of the subject, or ‘the most complete contribution to
the etiology and psychology of pyromania in any language’ (Anon., 1861: 223). As Geller
(1992: 285) has noted, Jessen’s synthesizing survey – accorded the distinction of a meaty
précis and commentary in The American Journal of Insanity – was highly instrumental in
focusing the dividing lines of debate in European and Anglo-speaking contexts (Jessen,
1860, 1861–2).5 Rejecting notions of pyromania as an instinctive disorder, Jessen conceived
most insane firesetting to emanate from more established diagnostic categories. However,
there was only partial consensus between Griesinger and Jessen over the nature of
pyromania. Adapting Esquirol’s notion of pyromania as a ‘reasoning monomania’ (i.e.
essentially motivated, rather than characterized by lack of motive), Jessen also conceded the
circumscribed permissibility of pyromania as a (rare) diagnosis (Baker, 1892a: 1056).

Geller argues that reaction against the wider application of the insanity defence in the USA
following the 1881 assassination of President Garfield was a significant factor in the
rejection of pyromania by most US medico-legal experts in the latter decades of the century.
He cites Pilgrim’s 1885 review of the pyromania literature, and its confident contention that
‘there is no such psychological entity as pyromania’, and an 1887 paper by Orpheus Everts
(Superintendent to Cincinnati Sanitarium), which addressed the validity not just of
pyromania but of all special manias (Everts, 1887; Pilgrim, 1885). Although Everts
concluded that all were distinct mental diseases, he also conceded that they were generally
subordinate to broader symptomological patterns. Others, such as William A. Hammond,
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New York Professor of Mental Diseases, who devoted three pages of his 1883 insanity
treatise to pyromania, including several long case histories mostly derived third-hand from
Hencke (via Marc and Esquirol), remained equally ambivalent. Hammond (1883: 438)
defined pyromania as an ‘emotional monomania’, synonymous with uncontrollable morbid
impulse, but also with what Livi and others had termed ‘instinctive monomania’. On the one
hand, Hammond asserted that pyromania was typically congenital, significantly more
common in females than males, strongly linked to menstrual and reproductive disorders, and
indubitably ‘a distinct type of morbid emotional disorder’ (p. 438). On the other hand, he
argued that: ‘The mere object of the impulse should not … be sufficient to elevate the act to
the dignity of a distinct species of insanity’, and that ‘pyromania … kleptomania, and so on’
were ‘useful’ merely to explicate the patient’s ‘main symptom’ (pp. 399–400).

However, in Britain it was a broader range of reasons, I would argue, that explains most
specialists’ rejection of pyromania, rather than any singular political event or trial. More
important as factors for British practitioners were: a growing resistance to symptom-led
diagnostic nosologies; the steady accumulation of empirical case history and institutional

5However, the Journal of Mental Science gave no coverage whatsoever to Jessen’s work on arson during 1860–1900, apart from
Baker’s article, though his contributions on other subjects were often cited; see Barnett, 2005: 11–26.

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experience of insane arson being more often the crime of the mentally defected, melancholic
and delusive than a matter of impulse-related incendiarism; mounting professional criticism
of the tendency for impulse-based defences to provide too elastic a licence for exculpation
of crime; and doubts and empirical experience regarding the courtroom utility of
complicated, artificial diagnostic constructs like pyromania.
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Some British textbooks, including John Hutton Balfour Browne’s monumental 713-page
book The Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity (1871), paid less attention to the criticisms of
Griesinger and others, and gave more scope to pyromania. Browne (son of the famous
Scottish moral manager, W.A.F. Browne) devoted a six-page section to pyromania (Browne,
1871: 148–53; 1875: 332–7). Heavily reliant on Marc and other continental case studies,
Browne clearly accepted both the medico-legal relevance and the utility of the term
pyromania, categorizing it as a ‘temporary excitement’ under the heading ‘Partial Moral
Mania’, and (à la Esquirol) classifying it – alongside kleptomania, erotomania/
nymphomania, and dipsomania/oinomania – under ‘monomania’ within the broader heading
‘states of exaltation’ (Browne, 1871: 148; 1875: 58). Browne (1871: 149) also emphasized
its relative frequency among all cases of arson: ‘on very many of the occasions where
houses, farm-buildings, and the like, are set fire to, it is by those … under the influence …
of pyromania’. He regarded the least contentious cases of pyromania as those demonstrably
acting under an irresistible impulse, or else a prevailing delusion, though his emphasis fell
mainly on the former. He stressed that the impulse had to be as strong/stronger than ‘the
motives for not committing the crime’ and thus irresistible, even though ‘no very prominent
intellectual features of disease may be discoverable’ (p. 151). Detailing cases from Marc,
Ray and others, Browne additionally distinguished such arsonists by their lack of motive,
and personal histories of radical character and conduct change. As regards delusive cases,
Browne was even keener to stress the traceability of ‘the insane origin of the act’, although
his examples, including the usual reference to Martin, were based on his reading and
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theoretical knowledge, rather than on his own empirical experience (p. 151). He was also
careful to emphasize the ‘many instances’ where no delusion was evident but offenders were
clearly insane and found lacking (rational) motive, unable to help themselves and otherwise
irresistibly driven. Yet even this survey concluded by stressing how uncommon was ‘this
form of insanity [i.e. pyromania]’, despite the evidence of occasional anomalous peaks in
reported cases on the continent (p. 153).

British debates post-1890: John Baker, Henry Maudsley and pyromania’s

supplanting with insane incendiarism
Despite intense ambiguities surrounding the medico-legal use of pyromania and the defence
of arsonists as irresponsible owing to impulsive or instinctive insanity, by the 1890s some
standard textbooks on insanity, the law and medical jurisprudence were complacently
registering pyromania as a relatively definitive and uncontested diagnosis (e.g. Pitt-Lewis,
Smith and Hawke, 1895: 5). Yet few British manuals included detailed discussions, let alone
dedicated sections/chapters, on the subject. Many US textbooks were also rather dismissive,
pyromania suffering neglect not only by comparison with homicidal mania but also
compared with more novel concepts such as puerperal mania, kleptomania and dipsomania.

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The Jefferson Medical College Professor of Jurisprudence, Henry C. Chapman, devoted a

single paragraph of his textbook to the subject in the following vague, narrow terms.

Pyromania, or the insane desire to set fire to anything, barns, dwelling-houses,

churches, is a less common form of mania than kleptomania. It appears to be often
associated with epileptic insanity. No doubt this form of mania, like the so-called
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moral mania, is made a convenient plea for the defence of crime, as in cases of
arson. (Chapman, 1892: 159).

Indeed, Anglophone authorities were increasingly dubious about the validity of pyromania,
although concurrently, if not always consistently, arguing for the need to widen recognition
of forms of insanity leading to arson more generally.

John Baker’s authoritative surveys of 1889 and 1892a highlight the departure of ‘modern
writers’ from previous classifications of morbid incendiary propensity as pyromania. Like
Griesinger (and, to a lesser extent, Taylor and Casper, whom he quoted and significantly
relied on), and by contrast with Hencke, Marc, Esquirol and Ray, Baker argued that
pyromania had been erroneously ‘elevated into a special form of insanity’, rejecting the term
as ‘misleading’. He maintained that ‘English observers’ generally ‘agree with … many of
the German writers … that it is not a disease per se, but the result of some of the well-known
forms of insanity’ (Baker, 1889: 46). Baker’s studies additionally underline the partial shift
that had occurred in medico-psychological and medico-legal accounts away from earlier
debates as to the extent that arsonists and other criminals could be understood as morally
insane. Acutely conscious of previous controversial psychiatric testimony which (in tending
to support the latter view) had (arguably) weakened expert witnessing in insanity defences,
Baker (1889: 45) was adamant that, although many incendiaries were to some degree
‘devoid of moral sense’, ‘moral perversion … is no excuse for crime’ (p. 45).
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Baker’s accounts of pyromania were in many respects highly conventional and indebted to
other authors. He largely accepted continental views associating pyromania with puberty
and reproductive/sexual disorders, especially in the case of females, citing Ernest-Émile
Rousseau’s (1881) survey, yet he also kicked against any ‘advancement of the mere dictum
of intermittent irresistible impulse’ (Baker, 1892a: 1058). Like Marc, he underlined the need
in establishing irresponsibility to investigate closely other prominent symptoms of mental
derangement, including (in pubescent cases) ‘vertigo, epistaxis, and derangement or
suppression of the menses … epilepsy or chorea … glandular swellings and cutaneous
eruptions’ (p. 1058). In other cases, like Griesinger, he pointed out the need to find evidence
as to ‘hereditary neurosis … infantile convulsions … previous indulgence in drink, and …
mental inquietude before the commission of the crime’ (p. 1058).

To some extent, too, Baker (p. 1057) parroted traditional descriptions of classic or ‘genuine
pyromaniacs’, summarizing them as:

young persons, for the most part dwellers in the country; badly developed, of
defective intelligence, hereditarily tainted with insanity or epilepsy, and presenting
anomalies in character, habits, and feelings; having, as a rule, no delusions, no
motive for their crimes, but imbued with an irresistible impulse to burn.

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Yet, while acknowledging his own clinical encounters with cases matching this description,
Baker attributed most insane incendiarism to mental defect and to melancholia, or else to
dementia, epilepsy, and delusive mania/mania à potù. Rather than harping on pyromania,
then, Baker delineated all cases of insane arson in accordance with ‘recognized forms of
insanity’, citing Greisinger and Jessen in support of his own particular nosological approach
(Baker, 1889: 47). Baker (pp. 47, 54 and notes) likewise reiterated ‘the generally received
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opinion’ that insane incendiarism was less to be understood as pyromania or a distinct

insanity than as predominantly a type of ‘“reasoning” monomania’, agreeing in this respect
with Esquirol and Jessen.

Thus, case by case, neatly summarized in tabulated form (Fig. 1), Baker associated
individual mentally disordered incendiarists at Broadmoor not with pyromania or moral
insanity, and only to a small degree (9%) with monomania, but rather with congenital
‘imbecility’ (amounting to over one third, 35%, of diagnoses); with melancholia (20% of
diagnoses, characterized especially by sensory and religious delusions/hallucinations); with
mania (17%); and (less commonly) with dementia (10%), general paralysis (6%) and
epilepsy (4%). This helps to explain why terms like pyromania, or other notions of arson as
a special mania, were so rarely employed in Broadmoor’s case notes and indeed in the
insanity defences of British incendiaries (especially by comparison with continental
institutions and courts).

Baker’s decision at this time to focus at on ‘incendiarism’ was itself inspired and justified by
its relative psychiatric and medico-legal neglect; by recognition that (echoing Taylor)
pyromania was ‘a condition not specially recognized by English jurists or in English courts
of law’ (Baker, 1889: 47); and by acknowledgement that it was much ‘more frequently …
and more fully’ discussed ‘in foreign than in English psychological literature’ (Baker,
1892a: 1056). His persuasive view (paraphrasing and extending North’s (1886: 172–3)
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earlier arguments, but also reflecting his own extensive empirical experience), was that ‘less
atrocious’ offences ‘seldom attract … interest in the accused’, or much judicial investigation
(Baker, 1892a: 1056; 1892c: 366–7). For this reason, Baker (1892a: 1056) argued, ‘in
offences like arson the question of responsibility is rarely raised … and conviction and
imprisonment follow as a matter of course’. This context additionally helps to explain why
the insanity defence appears to have been utilized more rarely in arson cases, by contrast
with capital offences ‘where the sanctity of life is in question’, and why so many mentally
affected lesser offenders wound up in prison (Baker, 1892c: 366). Indeed, stressing the large
‘number of incendiaries [in previous times] … found insane whilst undergoing sentence, and
transferred from penal restraint to asylum custody’, Baker (1892a: 1056) appealed for
significant improvement in ‘pre-trial investigations of the mental condition of such cases’.
This was, of course, an area that busy Broadmoor-based practitioners were notably less
engaged in than other mental specialists and ordinary general medical practitioners, the
former tending to see criminal lunatics for the first time post-trial/imprisonment. Citing one
case of a repeat arsonist where no expert medical testimony was called, and evidence of his
‘weak mind’ and congenital ‘brain disorder’ was dismissed despite jury appeals, Baker
(1892c: 366–7) contended: ‘Were the individual psychological peculiarities of these weak-
minded criminals strictly investigated, and their modes of life and family histories fully

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inquired into, the question of responsibility might be more frequently raised’. While as
scholarship has elucidated (Eigen, 1991, 1995; Smith, 1981a, 1981b, 1988a–c), mental and
forensic specialists were an increasingly prominent presence in Victorian courtrooms, expert
psychiatric testimony appears to have been less frequently and conspicuously involved in
cases of arson. In Britain the perpetrators of arson were also disadvantaged by class and sex
by comparison with perpetrators of murder, or even theft, in terms of attracting sympathetic
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elite counsel or specialist involvement, being overwhelmingly found to be males from

poorer social backgrounds.

Baker’s 1889 and 1892 arson surveys were both a response to and a reflection of the general
lack of concern with the subject in Anglophone medico-psychological literature. But Baker
conducted no further exclusive or lengthy survey of arson once he became Broadmoor’s
Deputy. His later publications made only occasional use of his forensic experience in
assessing arson cases: for example, he referred to arsonists in a single paragraph within his
larger survey on ‘general paralysis and crime, where he discussed 7 arsonists out of 62 cases
with GPI admitted since 1863, all of whom he categorized as having ‘belonged to the
exalted type’ (Baker, 1903: 439, 447). And few other Anglophone forensic practitioners
spilled much ink on the subject before the 1920s and 1930s (e.g. East, 1946; Goldwyn,
1930; Young, 1925). When they spoke of arson and pyromania at all, most British insanity
specialists, including Henry Maudsley, did so in a rather haphazard fashion, as one among a
number of examples, rather than as a subject in itself. Moreover, following Griesinger’s
lead, Maudsley too was actively contesting the continuing usefulness of such diagnostic
terms. Maudsley argued that pyromania, suicidal mania, homicidal mania and kleptomania
had ‘no existence as distinct diseases’, but were obfuscating ‘metaphysical’ terms, jargon-
like fig leaves, professionally and publicly manifesting a mere ‘semblance of knowledge’
(Maudsley, 1874: 80–1; 1899, 81–2). Criticizing the tendency of modish psychiatric
nosologists (in particular, Morel) to categorize mental diseases according to ‘prominent
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mental symptoms’, rather than prevailing physical causes, Maudsley (1874: 80–1; 1899: 81–
2) rejected pyromania and its ilk as ‘concealing inadequate observation under a pretentious
name’. Echoing Griesinger and Baker, he advocated thoroughgoing investigation and
observation of bodily and mental features in every case, to ensure focus on the underlying
cause(s) and accurate presentation of ‘real disease’, both in practice and in courtroom
diagnosis/testimony. The tendency for judges and jurists presiding over insanity defences to
be preoccupied, post-McNaughten Rules, with demonstrating that criminal acts plainly arose
from derangement, and/or absence of moral control/knowledge of right and wrong, and
profound/florid mental derangement or prevailing delusions, itself counselled specialists like
Maudsley to emphasize opposing criteria. Contrariwise, they stressed the need for specialists
to challenge such reductionism with careful scientific proofs of varying degrees of disease-
compromised responsibility, and broader links between mental derangement/defect and
insane/irresponsible acts.

The uneven decline of impulsive pyromania

As indicated above, insane arsonists were also concurrently conceptualized as suffering
from disorders of impulse/will, mentally disordered arsonists being commonly declared
cases of ‘impulsive insanity’. Rather than related merely to pyromania, or any special/

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exclusive diagnostic concept, such cases were often more broadly conceptualized as driven
by uncontrollable/irresistible impulse, sometimes related to pathologized life-cycle or
arrested/morbid development models, especially linked with adolescence. Sutherland (1907:
589) detailed one typical case as follows: ‘R.F., aet 18 … sets fire to a dormitory in order to
ascertain how his fellow pupils feel being roasted. In other respects his conduct was …
precocious and impulsive … a case of impulsive insanity associated with early adolescence’.
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Smith emphasized the early disenchantment of medico-psychological specialists with the

McNaugten Rules’ stress on knowledge as the barometer of responsibility, while
concurrently noting the initial medico-legal appeal of irresistible impulse as a basis for an
insanity defence. However, Smith and others also recognized the fragility of this doctrine to
the reservations of judicial and legal officials as the Victorian era progressed, and how
experienced medical expert witnesses such as Forbes Winslow and Maudsley recommended
eschewing such contested medical theory, acknowledging its flaws and limited feasibility
(Smith, 1981a, 1981b, 1988a, 1988b, 1988c; see also: Cleman, 1991; Finkel, 2007).
Evidence from some contemporary arson cases and medico-legal discussions of arson may
suggest that scholarly analysis somewhat exaggerated the speed, universality and durability
of medico-legal retreat from irresistible impulse based insanity defences. For example,
Geller (1992: 285) argues that in the USA, from the 1900s, there was a revival in the
espousal of pyromania among alienists and medico-legists, especially following the
translation of Kraepelin’s seminal Clinical Psychiatry textbook and the development of
psychoanalysis (Kraepelin, 1902, 1904). Influentially, Kraepelin defined pyromania in 1902
as impulsive insanity arising from an irresistible impulse to set fires, arguing for a widened
application of pyromania as an insanity defence, and for sufferers to be certified and
institutionally cared for, rather than imprisoned or punished. Moreover, if pyromania re-
emerged ‘as a disease entity’ in this period, Geller claims that it was in post-1920 USA that
the diagnosis especially flourished, reasserted as ‘an irresistible impulse, a urethra-erotic
character trait, an obsession, or a psychosexually based impulse neurosis’ (Geller, 1992;
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Geller, Erlen and Pinkus, 1986: 222–3).

Yet in Britain pyromania and impulsive arson remained highly contested and seldom used
diagnoses, while by the early 1900s many forensic psychiatric experts, including
Broadmoor’s (then) Superintendent and Deputy, Richard Brayn and John Baker, were
asserting emphatically that ‘sudden impulse’ had been misapplied and over-used in the
courtroom. Revising the discourses of the 1850s and 1860s which had informed mid-
Victorian sensationalist literary portrayals, they objected that many putatively impulsive
crimes were in fact ‘carefully planned and long thought out’, the result of prolonged
‘brooding’ (Baker, 1903: 438–49, and discussion, 449–50). More stress, they argued, should
be placed on prevailing morbid ideas and delusions leading to action and less on the
presence (or lack) of deliberation. Numerous continental and (somewhat fewer) Anglo/
American criminological surveys had touted pyromania and kleptomania more
enthusiastically as arising from morbid instinct and impulses, and thus as more broadly
exculpable. Significantly, however, British medico-legal and medico-psychological
specialists, determined to defend the scientific boundaries of their own particular areas of
expertise, expressed considerable reservations regarding criminological contributions to

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debates on insanity and crime. In his article on kleptomania, Baker poured caricaturing scorn
on the:

growing disposition amongst … criminal anthropologists to regard the majority of

criminals as persons of unsound mind, having a special neurosis … as drawn to
crime by instinct … the professional thief, setting aside those of weak mind, is not
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a criminal by instinct, but rather from the force of bad example and a criminal
education. (Baker, 1892b: 726)

In his MPA Presidential Address of 1895 (Nicolson, 1895a), and the discussion which
ensued, Broadmoor’s Superintendent, David Nicolson, was similarly critical of the
contribution of criminology to understandings of criminal insanity. Although accepting the
validity of criminological arguments about the existence of criminal types, and that some ‘at
the lower end’ were possessed of such clearly marked ‘morbid psychology’ as to be more or
less insane, he pointed out that this applied to only a small minority of criminals, and denied
‘that there is any such thing as a criminal neurosis …, psychosis, or an instinctive
criminality’ (Nicolson, 1895b: 590).

By the 1920s, the doctrine of irresistible impulse as applied to arson was held in even more
doubt in Britain, though its decline as a basis for an insanity plea appears to have been
uneven.6 Most forensic specialists had long stressed that ‘an alleged irresistible impulse to
commit an incendiary act’ could only be significant in mitigating responsibility provided
that its origin/accompaniment in definite mental disease/defect was established. Yet,
increasingly, practitioners – such as H.T.P. Young, the Portland Prison MO, who published
a detailed study of adult male incendiarists in 1925 – argued that impulsiveness was seldom
present in most mentally unsound arsonists, and that generally a clear and deliberate motive
was evident.

In the majority of arson cases it is possible to elicit a plan of some sort [thus] … it
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would be rare for arson to arise from a chance impulse … not resisted … [Arson]
necessitates some preparation … That recurrent impulses occur to set fire to
property is not disputed, but in none of the cases examined could the action be
described as impulsive. (Young, 1925: 1334)

As he also asserted (reiterating Baker, 1892a), ‘the condition, moreover, is not recognised in
English courts’ (Young, 1925: 1335). The 1923 (Lord Justice) Atkin Committee on Insanity
and Crime had recommended maintaining but supplementing the McNaughten Rules via
legislation to establish more clearly the feasibility of the irresistible impulse based insanity
defence (Scottish Law Commission, 2003), but the subsequent 1924 Criminal Responsibility
(Trials) Bill floundered repeatedly in the Lords because of traditional judicial hostility to the
doctrine. Critical debate and ultimate rejection (despite a second reading) of the Bill had
gravitated fundamentally around hostility towards its proposed legal enshrinement of
irresistible impulse (Hansard, 1924). The putative role of such impulses in pyromania/arson
was not discussed in such debates, but their allegedly key role in analogous cases of
kleptomania was debated at length. Most Lords argued that, however impulsive, offenders

6Most historians have concentrated on the recession of irresistible impulse as a feasible plea in insanity defences for capital offences
such as homicide; e.g. Smith, 1981a; White, 1985.

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were rarely totally lacking in control, most being perfectly aware of the nature and quality of
their acts; that most cases were already usually dealt with sympathetically via mitigated
sentencing; and that it would be ‘dangerous’ to accord complete irresponsibility/immunity
from punishment via statutory recognition of such a doctrine.

Numerous modern psychiatric surveys of arson continue to stress the role of impulsivity in
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mental disorders, but intense debate remains over how to define and determine impulsivity.
The concept of irresistible impulse has been substantially reframed and narrowed in more
recent studies, but mentally unsound arsonists are still generally categorized under ‘impulse
control disorders’ (e.g. Hegerl, 2004; Hollweg, 1994). Furthermore, ‘expressive arsons’,
conceptualized as ‘opportunistic and impulsive acts, motivated by emotional distress’, are
generally distinguished from instrumental arson (seen as ‘planned’ or ‘motivated’, e.g. by
revenge), and tend to be diagnosed in much higher proportions of ‘serial’ offenders (e.g.
McElroy et al., 1993; Wachi et al., 2007). Yet, although pyromania is commonly ‘regarded
as an impulse-control disorder … controversy continues over whether the condition should
be classified under the impulse-control disorders or … whether it comprises a separate entity
at all’ (Lindberg, Holi, Tani and Virkkunen, 2005). As Lindberg et al. additionally observe,
pyromania was included in DSM-I and II, but excluded from DSM-III, and was only re-
introduced in a circumscribed form to DSM-IV, restricted by a host of exclusion criteria.
Similar conclusions can be found in much recent psychiatric literature on arson, although
Hollweg (1994, abstract) argued that it was the strict application of DSM-III and ICD-10
criteria which explained why ‘most … fire-settings could not be classified under this
subcategory of “disorders of impulse control”’, even though ‘impairments of impulse
control are typical … in most cases of arson’.

Insane ‘intent’ and arson: revenge and morbid-motivations for arson

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Modern studies of mentally disturbed arsonists have almost unanimously highlighted the
prominence of revenge as the commonest motivation among both male and female
offenders. While concurrently observing similar motivational patterns among sane arsonists
detained in penal/corrective institutions, they have also pointed to the high incidence of
mental disturbance among such cases (e.g. Puri, Baxter and Cordess, 1995; Stewart, 1993).
Early nineteenth-century continental and Anglophone medico-psychologists also remarked
on the common presence of vengeful motives among deranged arsonists. Typically, Marc
(1833; cit. Ray, 1853: 202–3) stressed that: ‘when they have avowed that they were
influenced by a desire of revenge; we cannot conclude with certainty, that they were in
possession of all their moral liberty, and that, consequently, they should incur the full
penalty of the crime’. Yet Victorian British legists were evidently much more prone to
attribute arson to sane motives of revenge for genuine or perceived wrongs/slights, and to
cunning and perversities of will, than to psychological causes or mental defect. Also,
medico-psychologists worked somewhat inconsistently to qualify such conventional legal
and societal views, themselves commonly pointing to characteristics of vengefulness and
deviousness combined with mental defect among many (responsible) arsonists and other
criminals.

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In significant measure because arson as a felony was legally defined as ‘malicious’,

furthermore, many trials tended to gravitate around establishing the presence or absence of
malign motives. As Browne (1871: 149) pointed out, ‘malice’ legally denoted merely
wicked intent/will rather than actual enmity (colloquially understood): in law it meant ‘the
wilful doing of a prohibited or injurious act without lawful excuse [or] … wicked or
mischievous intention’, and thus it was inessential to establish the presence or absence of
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enmity. Taylor (1856) similarly emphasized the limited relevance of motive to deliberating
on insanity, reporting the judicial observation in the unsuccessful (1844) Rex v. James
Gibson arson-insanity defence, that ‘it would be a fatal error to infer insanity from …
inadequacy of motive’ (Taylor, 1856: 675). Yet, as a number of test cases during the 1870s
and 1880s demonstrated, distinguishing malicious (or intentional) from inadvertent or
negligent arson could be crucial in determining both guilt and the severity of punishment
(Browne, 1871: 149). Moreover, establishing the absence/lack of motive and intent in
practice was often fundamental in influencing juries when it came to insanity defences for
arson. The key provisions of the 1861 Malicious Damage Act (despite five later amending
Acts) were not comprehensively repealed and replaced (bar six sections) until the Criminal
Damage Act of 1971 (c48). It was only at this time that ‘malicious damage’ was supplanted
with the terms ‘reckless’ (as in deliberately risking damage) or ‘willful’ [sic] (as in
intentional/deliberate) (House of Lords, 2003).

Most authorities, Griesinger included, emphasized the common absence of motive in insane
arson cases and the prevalence of ego/will deficiencies (Griesinger, 1867: 270–1, n2).
Contrariwise, in ways which, as we shall see, sometimes undercut the success of expert
witnessing at insanity defences, such specialists were also concerned to stress morbidly
‘egotistical’ motives of ‘revenge’, and how young male servants might seek through house-
firing to curtail ‘an impatiently borne period of service and return home’ (p. 270). Griesinger
additionally surmised an opportunistic element in the patterning of such crimes, pointing to
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the extensiveness of fireplace duties in domestic service, and the ‘readiness … to hand’ of
the ‘means by which they can satisfy the morbid craving which torments them’ (p. 270).
Browne was certainly convinced that if arson was characterized (as it was often shown to
be) by strong motives of revenge that it normally rendered the individual responsible:

Many cases … occur in which the act seems to have been dictated by feelings of
revenge. And in such cases, even although there may be mental weakness, there
does not appear to be sufficient ground either to regard it as pyromania or to hold
the individual irresponsible for the act. (Browne, 1871: 151).

Baker (1889: 45) similarly saw the question of motive as pivotal in distinguishing sane from
insane arson: ‘[in arson] by sane persons a motive invariably underlies the crime’.
Nonetheless, his earlier essay forcefully asserted that ‘when a motive exists with absence of
mental derangement the act should be regarded as criminal’, but that ‘the presence of mental
aberration with or without motive will indicate that the patient is suffering from the insanity
of pubescence or adolescent insanity, and is therefore irresponsible’ (Baker, 1892a: 1058).
Both articles carefully delineated the primary motives medico-legal opinion ascribed to
arsonists, stressing economic gain ‘by defrauding insurance companies’, ‘fear, anger, hatred,
and nostalgia’, the erosion of self-control, but moreover stressing ‘revenge’ (also often

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alcohol induced/influenced) as among the most conspicuous and common (Baker, 1892a:
1058; 1889: 45). Yet Baker recognized that ‘revenge is also a powerful incentive to arson
amongst weak-minded people’, pointing to their liability to acutely experience ‘real or
fancied wrongs’ and injuries, and to ‘seek’ via arson ‘to wreak their revenge’. In addition, he
characterized typical mentally defective incendiarists as homeless, vagrants, ‘wandering
aimlessly about the country’, who ‘driven by distress or want … set fire to isolated stacks or
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out-houses, in order [to] … find shelter in prison’ (Baker, 1889: 46).

Baker was keen to stress, nonetheless, that many such cases, especially where a clear motive
and only ‘[partial] weak-mindedness may be proved to exist’, must ‘be regarded as
essentially criminal’ (Baker, 1889: 47). Reflecting a degree of contemporary social prejudice
against labouring (and soldiering) classes deemed recidivist, workshy and unruly, he
presented a number of cases of repeat offenders to illustrate his points (Baker, 1892a: 1058;
1889: 46–7). Baker asserted that only when such ‘weak-mindedness’ or ‘mental aberration’
was more severe/complete, and might ‘amount to imbecility’, or originate from ‘epilepsy’ or
‘neurosis’, might the act be ‘supposed’ to derive from insanity and the accused be adjudged
irresponsibly insane (Baker, 1889: 46–7). While he acknowledged the difficulty in such
cases of determining ‘the measure of their responsibility’, his rather disparaging descriptions
reflect the considerable limits to the insanity defence when it came to defendants who
displayed elements of cunning/deliberation alongside more debatable symptoms of mental
defect:

[A]s a rule, they possess unlimited capacity for lying and deceit … Owing to [their]
… pretended want of memory, it is … by no means … easy … to deduce the
measure of their responsibility. The cunning displayed by them, the precautions
taken to avoid discovery, and the presence of motive without clear evidence of
insanity, will stamp the act as criminal. (Baker, 1892a: 1057–8)
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In an influential article, which had clearly struck a chord with Baker at Broadmoor, S.W.
North had explored insanity and criminal responsibility in depth, focusing primarily on
insane homicide, but also on lesser crimes such as arson (North, 1886). As with Baker,
North argued that sane and insane motives for crimes were often alike, stressing the
difficulties in sorting out the responsible from the irresponsible. Like Baker also he was
keen to make firm distinctions between habitual criminals with elements of mental
weakness, and those whose mental unsoundness was marked and directly causative of the
criminal act. North delineated three essential categories of crime associated with insanity
around which medico-legal debates especially gravitated, namely weak-minded crime,
delusions and impulsive acts. He stressed that the first category was not only much more
common among offenders but was also less apt to provide grounds for successful insanity
pleas. Although the sinking of such people into ‘the dregs of the criminal class’ (North,
1886: 172) might be regretted and combated, like many contemporary medico-legists North
was not prepared to countenance that such mental weakness was normally sufficient to
excuse offenders’ acts. On the one hand, perpetrators ‘with feeble mental power’ were seen
as somewhat ‘helpless’, lacking ‘initiative’ and adaptability. On the other hand, North
contended, they were innately atavistic, ‘driven by lust’ and lacking the normal constraints
upon ‘animal passions’, easily ‘enraged by the slightest provocation’, prone to seek

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gratification via ‘inordinate’ violent acts ‘towards those who cross them’, and also
commonly lacking remorse for their crimes, though fully aware ‘of the nature and quality of
their acts’ (North, 1886: 172).

Nonetheless, while in courtroom practice evidence of vengeful feelings was more often
perceived as on the side of sanity/responsibility, during the latter decades of the century
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medico-psychologists were much more prepared to recognize the commonality of clear and
malicious motives among mentally disordered arsonists. Decades of medico-legal challenge
to the McNaughten Rules’ right and wrong test had seen professionals increasingly
appreciative of the presence of powerful vindictive motivations, alongside elements of
cognizance and deliberation as to crime in the mentally weak and unstable. Far from being
motiveless, the violent acts and impulses of imbeciles were regarded by authorities like
North and Baker as typically ‘provoked’, imbeciles acting ‘like other people when angered’,
but merely lacking intellectual control over base passions/instincts (North, 1886: 176).
Delusions were also conceived as providing clear though morbid motivation for incendiarist
acts. Those of unsound mind were perceived as especially prone to act out disproportionate
vengeful feelings for imagined or trivial wrongs, particularly when dominated by delusions
and/or hallucinations, though quite aware that their acts were unlawful and quite capable of
distinguishing between right and wrong:

It is … very common … for persons of unsound mind to hear voices [or] …

[delusive] commands … they revenge themselves by acts of violence on persons
who have done them no wrong, or where the wrong is of the most trivial or
imaginary character, their acts far exceeding what the real or imaginary wrong
might justify … Yet all such people know well enough what is right and wrong.
(North, 1886: 173)

Commenting on a much cited Edinburgh Court of Justiciary case of Dr Smith, found insane
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on a charge of fire-raising in 1855, Browne similarly recognized that ‘a man with a delusion
resorts to many of the same acts that a sane man will’, including incendiarism ‘with the
intention of revenging a supposed injury’ (Browne, 1871: 152, citing Rex v Smith, Edin.
High Court, 15–17 Jan. 1855, 2 Irvine, 1). However, medico-legal authorities also often
construed such cases as outside the proper definition of pyromania, Browne asserting that
such delusive arson, ‘although an insane act, is not that of a pyromaniac’ (Browne, 1871:
152). Baker likewise maintained that many were acting in abeyance to, or else seeking relief
from, prevailing maniacal and melancholic delusions (confirming Griesinger’s earlier
observations). To illustrate the former, he related the case of H.R., an itinerant musician
found insane on trial, whose barn-firing was attributed to a delusive compulsion to alert the
township ‘that he was about to be murdered’ (Baker, 1889: 51). Likewise, the cases of
monomaniacal melancholia Baker detailed included J.W., a sailor who ‘set fire to a lodging
house in consequence of being tormented constantly with the smell of burning’; the ‘low-
spirited and suicidal’ F.D., who posted a letter, matches and straw through his mother’s
letter-box, under the deluded belief that this was the best means of communicating with the
spirit of his recently departed father; and another patient who ‘declared he was burned with
irons during the night’ (Baker, 1889: 53–4). By contrast, cases of ‘destructive fury’ not

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associated with delusion or mental defect tended to be articulated quite differently (Baker,
1889: 53–4).

For North (1886: 176), only in cases of ‘transitory’ or ‘irresistible impulse’ was violence
conceived as usually motiveless and unprovoked, or else precipitated by ‘very trivial
provocation’. Such individuals were sometimes understood as classic monomaniacs,
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intellectually intact, and in many respects and for long periods displaying ‘no symptoms of
disease’ (p. 176). Yet partly because of empirical experience and partly because of the
difficulties of establishing a defence founded on irresistible impulse (a term which North
designated ‘not a happy phrase’), such cases were also seen as ‘rare’ (pp. 175–6).
Increasingly, the more common cases of irresponsible insane incendiarism (as with other
violent crimes) were associated with mental defect or delusion. Nonetheless, the partial and
uneven recasting of pyromania and insane incendiarism as ‘reasoning monomania’ by Baker
and earlier European medico-legal specialists had itself been reinforced by a clearer
recognition that significant elements of prevailing motive were commonly present among
insane arsonists and other mentally disordered criminals.

Continental specialists consistently pointed to the common propensity, as Raol Leory,

assistant physician to Evreux Asylum put it, of ‘feeble-minded delinquents … to set fire to
buildings or other objects in revenge against their owners or in some cases merely to amuse
themselves with the spectacle’ (Leroy, 1904: 583). Baker and other Broadmoor authorities
were similarly at pains to elucidate the prominence of vengeful and spiteful aims in the case
histories of their incendiarist inmates. It had only been gradually and somewhat
inconsistently that Victorian and Edwardian forensic experts challenged the standard
construction of insane and irresponsible arson as lacking motive, and began to stress the
existence of exculpatory morbid or irrational/mental defective motivations behind the
offences of many arsonists. Nonetheless, medico-psychological specialists were generally
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keen to contest the tendency of legists to narrow the definition of what constituted mental
disorder/defect affecting responsibility. Maudsley (1874: 68–9), going as far as to impugn
‘lawyers’ as ‘for the most part’ having less ‘knowledge of insanity … than that of the
vulgar’, underlined the commonality of milder ‘forms of disease’ where symptoms were ‘of
a more subtile [sic] and obscure character’, and where ‘insanity displays itself not in
thoughts but in acts’.

French and other continental research on criminal responsibility, and on the mental and
physical make up of criminals in penal institutions, including the work of Delbrück, often
conceptualized and categorized arson, alongside murder, violent assault and rape/sexual
offences, not only as emotionally/vengeance motivated crimes, but as crimes of passion
(crimes passionnelles) (for the legal application of crimes passionelles, see: Guillais, 1991;
Harris, 1988, 1989; Lieberman, 1999). Citing Delbrück’s work, Griesinger (1867: 148)
accepted that ‘mental disease amongst criminals is more frequent in those who have
committed crimes from passionate motives’, including arsonists. In Victorian Britain
however, by contrast with France and the USA, as Weiner’s studies of legal and societal
attitudes to male homicide and provocation have elucidated, defences of provocation/crime
of passion were less common and less successful. By the 1880s, ‘intolerance’ of these
defences was becoming a marker ‘of British identity and superiority’, and similar

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intolerance also appears to have furthered juridical resistance to special pleading based on
such medico-psychological doctrines as irresistible impulse (Weiner, 2004). Significantly, as
a marker of hardening Victorian attitudes to domestic violence, Weiner cited the sarcastic
commentary of the contemporary press in the form of the Pall Mall Gazette regarding the
1872 case of a drunkard homicidally pushing his drunken wife on the fire. Castigating the
Lancaster jury’s mitigating verdict on this case and the novelty of this form of spousal
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‘correction’, this newspaper moreover satirized its putative defence via the doctrines of both
provocation and irresistible impulse.

[A] new mode of correcting wives – by placing them on the fire – is growing into
favour among husbands … no grosser provocation can present itself to an
intoxicated man than the discovery that his wife is intoxicated also; and when once
his passions are fully aroused … the idea of putting her on the fire would suggest
itself so naturally and with such irresistible force that to refrain from this act would
demand a larger measure of self-control than can be reasonably expected from our
weak and erring humanity. (Weiner, 1999: para 35)

Nonetheless, as Weiner also points out, declining provocation defences and ‘higher
expectations of personal self-control’ among the judiciary, were partially replaced by a
widened countenancing (especially among Victorian juries) of exculpatory evidence of
mental disease and an expanded ‘leeway for arguments of mental unsoundness’ (Weiner,
1999: paras 24–26, 35, 63–64).

Of course, as we have seen, revenge or ‘passion’ was far from the only motive ascribed to
insane arsonists. Many authorities, like Browne (1871: 150), highlighted the variety of
motives in such cases: ‘the power of motives varies in every individual mind, and in the
same individual at different times and seasons’. Baker (1892a: 1059) further elaborated that
while: ‘[some] imbeciles … are prone to … fire-raising … for the mere pleasure of seeing a
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blaze … from childish mischief or imbecile spite … [others] will stoutly deny any
knowledge of the crime, and … blame … some other person; another will take keen pleasure
in detailing the … fires he has caused’. Both pre- and post-1913, psychiatric specialists
remained deeply concerned with motive, and with tracing common patterns in the intent of
fire-raisers. Modern surveys have highlighted many of the same motivational patterns for
juvenile arson that Victorian and Edwardian specialists identified, including pathological
anger, curiosity, nostalgia, mischief, revenge, cries for help, heroism, irresistible impulse,
fetishism, while also stressing the importance of motive assessment in risk evaluation for
future firesetting and in selecting appropriate treatments (Faulk, 1982; Finkel, 2007; Gaynor
and Hatcher, 1987; Lewis and Yarnell, 1951; Wooden and Berkey, 1984). However, more
recent psychiatric stress on the heterogeneity of arsonists’ motives has sometimes
challenged the utility of motive-based typologies. Indeed, forensic psychiatrists have been
more critical recently of the specificity, ‘validity, utility and correlates’ of such motive
constructs, and the lack of convincing empirical data effectively comparing adult and child/
adolescent arsonists with differential motives and psychological dysfunction (Jacobson,
1985a, 1985b; Kolko and Kazdin, 1991).

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Conclusions: the continuing narrow scope of pyromania

The Victorian and early Edwardian debates about pyromania that I have been delineating
established clearly the diagnosis and its feasibility as an insanity defence, but in Britain (and
the USA) in particular this remained on rather restricted and ambiguous terms. Not only was
pyromania, as we have seen, rarely employed with confidence in the publications of British
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forensic psychiatric experts dealing with arson, it was also seldom used by Broadmoor’s
medical men or indeed in contemporary patients’ case files and notes, and in official reports,
correspondence and minuted discussions. Medical and medico-legal practitioners tended to
stress pyromania’s exceptionality, to confine and subordinate its applicability beneath
broader diagnostic nosologies, and often to exclude cases of insane firesetting with
passionate/vengeful motivations. Yet many of the key debates and conclusions animating
these specialists about arson and mental unsoundness continue to have a place in current
psychiatric literature. Indeed, as I hope I have demonstrated, and as Whitlock (1999: 435)
noted with regard to Victorian kleptomania, it is striking how much of the interpretive
edifice of the pyromania diagnosis remains intact today. While in Victorian times those
diagnosed with pyromania tended primarily to be adult males with congenital mental defect,
in modern times this diagnosis is even more tightly circumscribed to adult ‘males, especially
those with poorer social skills and learning difficulties’ (Hales, Yudofsky and Gabbard,
2008: 791). Pyromania is now generally applied to denote repeated firesetting, for no
rational motive or for no motive other than fascination, gratification or relief in setting/
witnessing fires (Moore and Jefferson, 2004). Currently, according to strict application of
DSM-IV coding, pyromania is categorized under ‘Impulse Control Disorders Not Otherwise
Classified’, and is regarded as ‘an extremely rare phenomenon’ and as ‘a rare diagnosis with
questionable validity’ (Lindberg et al., 2005).

DSM-IV has narrowed pyromania down to a set of criteria that not only exclude most cases
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of arson committed by persons diagnosed with psychiatric illnesses, but which exclude most
child firesetters almost completely from such a diagnosis. The consensus is that firesetting in
juveniles must generally be differentiated from adult pyromania, and regarded as a
‘communicative’ arson attributable to developmental issues, to Conduct Disorder, ADHD,
or Adjustment Disorder. DSM-IV-TR criteria for a pyromania diagnosis are as follows
(APA, 2004; Mavromatis, 2000: 70):

1. Deliberate and purposeful firesetting on more than one occasion.

2. Tension or affective arousal before the act.

3. Fascination with, interest in, curiosity about, or attraction to, fire and its situational
contexts (e.g. paraphernalia/equipment, uses, and consequences/aftermath, of fire).

4. Pleasure, gratification, or relief when setting fires, or when witnessing or

participating in the aftermath.

5. No other motives for setting fires, such as monetary gain; ideological convictions
(such as terrorist or anarchist political beliefs); anger or revenge; to conceal
criminal activity; owing to delusions or hallucinations; or impaired judgment (e.g.

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resulting from substance abuse, dementia, mental retardation, or traumatic brain

damage).

6. Firesetting cannot be better accounted for by anti-social personality disorder, a

conduct disorder, or a manic episode.

Currently, also, most adult mentally ill arsonists, including most of the minority of repeat or
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‘recidivist’ offenders, tend to be diagnosed with an impulse-control disorder, or else with

personality disorders, psychosis and mental retardation, while around as many as two-thirds
or more of these are recognized to have committed arson under alcohol intoxication, or else
reported comorbid alcoholism (e.g. Grant, 2008; Hollander and Stein, 2005; Lindberg et al.,
2005; Williams, 2002). In more recent decades, not only has the inherent ‘dangerousness’ of
firesetters been questioned (Brett, 2004), but female arsonists have represented a much more
significant proportion of offenders than in Victorian and Edwardian times, comprising over
40% of all admissions to special hospitals in England and Wales during the 1980s and
1990s. Also, arson has predictably become much less of a primarily agriculturally directed
offence, vehicles, industrial and commercial premises, and places of entertainment
becoming more prominent as targets, although domestic dwellings and insurance motivated
attacks continue to loom large (e.g. Barker, 1994; Prins, 1994: 16, 20).

Acknowledgments
Funding: This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust, grant number 047082.

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Figure 1.
Baker’s (1889: 48) tabulation of Broadmoor arsonists’ diagnoses, 1864–86
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