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 1894Lee Grieveson, Peter Krämer, The Silent Cinema Reader, Routledge, 2004, , p. 59Ronald Pearsall (1969) The Worm in the Bud: the world of Victorian sexuality, Macmillan; pp. 321, 364Peter Mendes, "Clandestine erotic fiction in English, 1800-1930: a bibliographical study", Scolar Press, 1993, , p. 319Alan Norman Bold, "The Sexual Dimension in Literature", Vision Press, 1983, , pp.94,97,102Claire Preston, A dictionary of literary terms and literary theory, Wiley-Blackwell, 1998, , p.688 by Charles CarringtonRachel Potter, "Obscene Modernism and the Trade in Salacious Books", Modernism/modernity, vol.16, no.1 (January 2009) pp.87-104 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 common in later Victorian pornography, is depicted as ultimately taking pleasure in the act:Mark Bracher, Lacan, discourse, and social change: a psychoanalytic cultural criticism, Cornell University Press, 1993, , pp.86-87 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, 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.Ronald Pearsall (1971) The Worm in the Bud: the world of Victorian sexuality, Penguin; p. 396
The plot may also have been inspired by the real-life case of Colonel Valentine Baker, who was convicted of an indecent assault on a young woman in a railway carriage in 1875.Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians, Faber and Faber, 2001, page 216
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 AgeAlan Norman Bold, "The Sexual Dimension in Literature", Vision Press, 1983, , p.97Howard Whitman, The sex age, Doubleday, 1962, p.64 set in New York.
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