''Raped on the Railway: a True Story of a Lady who was first ravished and then flagellated on the Scotch Express'' is an anonymous English pornographic story published in 1894 Alan Norman Bold, "The Sexual Dimension in Literature", Vision Press, 1983, , pp.94,97,102 by Charles CarringtonRachel Potter, "Obscene Modernism and the Trade in Salacious Books", ''

Modernism/modernity ''Modernism/modernity'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal established in 1994 by Lawrence Rainey and Robert von Hallberg. History It covers methodological, archival, and theoretical approaches to modernist studies in the long modern ...

'', vol.16, no.1 (January 2009) pp.87-104

/ref> under the imprint "Society of Bibliophiles"Peter Webb, ''The erotic arts'', Secker & Warburg, 1975, p.200 or "Cosmopolitan Bibliophile Society".Harald Leupold-Löwenthal, ''Ein unmöglicher Beruf: über die schöne Kunst, ein Analytiker zu sein Arbeiten zur Psychoanalyse'', Böhlau Verlag Wien, 1997, , p.153 The victim, a married woman, is raped by a stranger in a locked railway compartment and, in a

trope Trope or tropes may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * Trope (cinema), a cinematic convention for conveying a concept * Trope (literature), a figure of speech or common literary device * Trope (music), any of a variety of different things ...

common in later Victorian pornography, is depicted as ultimately taking pleasure in the act: she is then flagellated by her brother-in-law for the latter transgression.Patricia J. Anderson, ''When passion reigned: sex and the Victorians'', BasicBooks, 1995, , pp.99-106 According to

Ronald Pearsall Ronald Joseph Pearsall (20 October 1927 – 27 September 2005) was an English writer whose scope included children's stories, pornography and fishing. His most famous book ''The Worm in the Bud'' (1969) was about Victorian sexuality, including o ...

, the story reflects the novel sexual opportunities afforded by railway travel in Victorian England, focused on the erotic opportunities of a male passenger in a railway carriage, who, unusually for the period, finds himself alone with an unchaperoned woman, and the sexual perils of the lady in question who cannot escape from his attentions or summon help from a closed carriage (corridors between carriages being a later innovation). The passage of the train through dark tunnels adds another frisson to the possibility of erotic adventure on the rails. The plot may also have been inspired by the real-life case of Colonel

Valentine Baker Valentine Baker (also known as Baker Pasha) (1 April 1827 – 17 November 1887), was a British soldier, and a younger brother of Sir Samuel Baker. Biography Baker was educated in Gloucester and in Ceylon, and in 1848 entered the Ceylon Rifles ...

, who was convicted of an indecent assault on a young woman in a railway carriage in 1875. An American adaptation, or plagiarism, was published in New York City under the title ''Raped on the Elevated Railway, a True Story of a Lady who was First Ravished and then Flagellated on the Uptown Express, illustrating the Perils of Travel in the New Machine Age'' set in New York.

References

{{reflist, 2 British pornography Pornographic novels 1894 British novels Works published anonymously Fiction about rail transport BDSM literature Rape in fiction