Flogging Phelim: Christian Isobel Johnstone, the Perils of Injustice and the Promise of Reform

From 1834 to1846, editor and contributor Christian Isobel Johnstone was the voice and vision of Tait’s Literary Magazine, whose motto was ‘Fiat Justititia’. The inaugural issue featured an article entitled ‘A Chapter on Flogging’ by ‘An Old Officer’. Flogging had also figured prominently in Johnstone’s 1815 novel Clan-Albin with the story of Irish soldier Phelim Bourke illustrating the dire consequences of such treatment. Johnstone’s concern with the physical and psychological effects of severe corporal punishment can be seen as part of the intense national commitment to Reform in 1830s Britain, a commitment fueled by ideals emerging from the American and the French Revolutions. Corporal punishment necessarily invokes questions of power and authority and inevitably raises the specter of arbitrary misuse of either or both. In Clan-Albin and in the story of the old officer in Tait’s Literary Magazine, flogging serves as both a literal practice that cries out for reform and as a powerful metaphor for the cost of inequity to disadvantaged individuals as well as to society as a whole. A just world, Johnstone maintains, is built not on fear and violence but on sympathy, understanding, and tolerance.