In the first season of Outlander, Starz's 2014 series based on Diana Gabaldon's time-travel novel of the same title, the Scottish Highlander hero Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) in the 1743 narrative is flogged by the British army offi- cer Jonathan “Black Jack” Randall (Tobias Menzies). Within the context of the series, the graphic brutalization of the improbably buff and hairless body of Jamie is told in flashback, prompted when the time-traveling nurse Claire (Caitriona Balfe) asks about the scars on his back. The flogging, a scene showrunner Ronald Moore describes as “truthful and awful, without being gratuitous,” powerfully presents the physical effects of that violence, the English attitude toward the Scots, and the relative impunity with which British military officers could act. (The flogging is by no means the only vio- lence enacted by the British military on Scots in the series.) The scene vividly reminds viewers that during the long eighteenth century, institutionalized military brutality was public, common, and widely known.

This episode first ran while I was teaching a senior seminar on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) titled The Persistence of Pride and Prejudice. The course looked at Austen's originating text and a series of twen- tieth- and twenty-first-century adaptations and remediations that followed. We were discussing the moment from chapter 12 in Austen's novel when Kitty and Lydia return to Longbourn and report the “information” from the militia stationed in the town of Meryton: “Much had been done, and much had been said in the regiment since the preceding Wednesday; several of the officers had dined lately with their uncle, a private had been flogged, and it had actually been hinted that Colonel Forster was going to be married.” It is easy for the inattentive reader to miss the reference to flogging in that line, situated as it is between dining and a prospective marriage. (Indeed, that is precisely Austen's point.) When brought to their attention, twenty- first-century college students have, at best, an abstract understanding of what flogging would actually entail. The three-minute scene from Outlander not only illustrates the physical punishment, but also makes students consider that the violent act committed by a British officer upon a Scotsman he sus- pects of treasonous activity in Outlander is, in Jane Austen's text, committed by a British officer upon one of his own men.