There are plenty of things about Edward Elgar’s Dorabella Cipher that rarely appear in the countless gosh-wow sites that feature it on the web. And arguably one of the biggest of these is its timeline.
1886: The Liszt Fragment
The earliest instance we know of where Elgar used the ‘Dorabella’ shapes to write something down was when jotting something in the left margin of a programme for a Liszt concert at the Crystal Palace (10th April 1886). The best quality image of this fragment appears on p.134 in Craig Bauer’s magisterial “Unsolved!”, which I reproduce here:
This contains a fair few repeated shapes, which would be good grist for the cryptanalytic mill were the fragment not so darned short:
Though Anthony Thorley claimed to have ‘decrypted’ this fragment in (or before) 1977 as “GETS YOU TO JOY, AND HYSTERIOUS”, this looks just plain wrong to Bauer (and to me). This is not only because none of the repeated letter usages line up, but also because it’s basically the wrong length (Thorley’s phrase is 25 letters long, while the fragment is made up of eighteen shapes plus a terminal dash).
If this Liszt fragment is a cipher, I’m sure Big Data people wouldn’t have to try hugely hard to build up a list of all 18-letter English letter sequences with the same aBCDeCfgBhiDCBijkl pattern. Perhaps looking for matches for the 13-letter stretch from BCD to DCB might be a productive exercise?
At the same time, it is tempting to wonder whether Elgar was using these shapes as some kind of idiosyncratic musical notation. However, even though the eighteen-glyph-plus-hyphen fragment appears in the margin beside an eighteen-note arpeggiated melody (Liszt’s “allegretto pastorale” motif, which appears as “an independent episode” according to the programme notes), it has none of its musical symmetry.
So: even though the Liszt fragments looks as though it really ought to be a simple cipher (and, moreover, a simple cipher that Elgar had without any real doubt used many times before), none of the claimed decryptions put forward for it make much sense. It’s possible Elgar was using his own brand of self-pleasing nonsense verbiage but… this is as far as we can get.
1897: The Dorabella Cipher
According to her 1937 book “Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation”, a young Dora Penny’s first met Edward Elgar on 6th December 1895. Elgar’s wife was an old friend of Dora’s stepmother, and so the couple had come to visit. Elgar and Dora talked, but not about music: rather, he wanted to know about Wolverhampton Wanderers (the club was close to the Penny’s house).
All the same, he did sit down at the piano in the drawing room before luncheon, where Dora turned over the pages for him. This proved to be a challenge, as “[w]hen it came to playing from his own manuscripts you often saw nothing but a few pencilled notes and a mark or two, when he was playing something tremendous – full orchestra and chorus perhaps“, though over time she did become “rather clever at it“.
Elgar first got to see a football match with Dora on 17th October 1896. He subsequently “was much taken with the names of some of the players – particularly Malpas. […] I have known him say when we met: ‘There you are. How’s Malpas?’ – a question I was not always able to answer.“
Her book reproduces a letter she received from Elgar with a distinctive red ‘E’ seal: all of which I think gives as close a representation of the likely content of the Dorabella Cipher as can reasonably be hoped for:
Forli Malvern March 4 [1897]
Dear Miss Penny
Here is some locomotive learning; so much nicer than mouldy music.
Alice tells me you are warbling wigorously in Worcestor wunce a week (alliteration archaically Norse).
I am very glad, but on second thoughts, as I have never heard you sing I am not sure: but perhaps some day if you are not rushing away I might arrange to show you over the Cathedral organ, K. John’s tomb and the Dane’s skin: (the Dane is dead).
By the way I have taken to ‘die-sinking’ as a recreation: here on the back of this is my parcel-post seal: I have to register all my MSS & they will not give a receipt unless they are sealed: so I put this on that my works may be Esily distinguished.
Kindest regards to everybody
Believe me sincerely yours
EDWARD ELGAR
The Dorabella Cipher is dated July 14 [18]97 and, if you haven’t already seen it a thousand times or more, looks like this:
This was “the third letter [Dora Penny] had from him, if indeed it is one“: so the March 4 letter was only one of two Elgar had previously written to Dora.
As to what the Dorabella Cipher says: I’ve previously (in 2013) speculated whether the first two words might be, just as with the March 4 letter, FORLI MALVERN. And the obvious suggestion that Elgar might have also included the phrase “How’s Malpas?” is entirely possible, though untested.
All the same, I’d point out that the general character of the glyph shapes seems to change on the third line. That is, the shapes lose their variety, and become visually monotonous, bland, repetitive, even dull. It’s as though Elgar kind of lost momentum, and stopped wanting to sustain the joke. Much as I have suggested with the famous unsolved Zodiac Z340 cipher (where the top half and bottom half have different statistical profiles / patterns), I do wonder whether we might be seeing two different things grafted together here, i.e. that the third line is quite different in nature from the first two. Just a thought.
Note: it was September 1898 when Edward Elgar first called Dora Penny “Dorabella” (as a quotation from Mozart’s Così fan tutte): so the one word we should not expect to see in the Dorabella Cipher is ‘Dorabella’.
1924 or later: the Marco Elgar Cipher
Yet another place where the rotating e/ee/eee letter-shapes appear in Elgar’s papers is where he uses it as a simple pigpen-style cipher:
This we can date as having been written not before 1924, because the plaintext refers to “MARCO ELGAR”, the name of Elgar’s beloved spaniel, and who was born on 27th May 1924 (a picture of his grave is here).
While the most obvious interesting thing about this it doesn’t work for the Dorabella Cipher, there is something about this sheet that gives me the impression that what Elgar is trying to do is to reconstruct his cipher system. It is hardly a coincidence, I would say (apologies to Thomas Ernst) that another phrase enciphered on this same page is “A VERY OLD CYPHER”.
Given the roughly thirty years’ difference between the Dorabella Cipher and the Marco Elgar cipher (and the absence of any other similar letter-shapes in Elgar’s generally quite well-preserved writings), perhaps it was something he amused himself with as a young man, but which he had by the age of about 70 (he was born in 1857) just plain forgotten.
Perhaps the circular shape on this page is some kind of E-based mnemonic (i.e. that the letters of the alphabet were arranged around), but which had slipped his mind. Certainly, you can see the letter E concealed in it without much difficulty, so perhaps that was part of the game?
Undated: The Cryptogram Card
Our final Elgarian cipher shapes first appeared in Craig Bauer’s “Unsolved!”. These are on a card marked “Cryptogram” (hence “The Cryptogram Card”), but are undated:
Though the writing is tiny, there are two main runs of eee-shapes: in the one just above the word “Cryptogram”, the triple curve shape rotates around, as if (as Craig points out) it is doing a gymnastic forward roll. In the run just below the word “Cryptogram, the three sizes of right facing ‘e’ appear in descending order, followed by the next rotation round. There are also a couple of cipher letters at the top.
What we see here are more like pen trials than cryptograms: so in almost all senses there’s really nothing of importance here.
Recent Dorabella Theories
Plenty of clever people – not just Eric Sams and Tony Gaffney – have already put forward their thoughts about (and their attempted decryptions of) the Dorabella Cipher. Needless to say, not more than one of them can be right at the same time. 🙂
But the list of attempts to explain it keeps getting longer. When Klaus Schmeh blogged about the Dorabella in 2018, one of the commenters (Thomas Ernst) put forward – at some length – his notion that Dora Penny might herself have faked all Elgar’s ciphers. This is an interesting suggestion: Dora certainly had full access to Elgar’s archives for decades, so clearly had opportunity – and I can see what he’s getting at when he draws a parallel between Dora Penny’s book and Bettina von Arnim’s (1835) “Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde”, which contains numerous stories about Goethe falsely adjusted to bring Bettina herself into the foreground (think of it as a kind of literary Forrest Gump).
But I think Ernst is being far too literal when he draws negative conclusions from the way that the post-1924 Marco Elgar page “A VERY OLD CYPHER” alphabet does not work for the Dorabella Cipher. His reasoning (unless I’ve misunderstood it) is that because the two are inconsistent, at least one is not genuine. And he then goes on to argue that if one is not genuine, there’s no reason to think that they are both not genuine.
I would agree that the two are indeed inconsistent. However, the rather different inferences I draw from the Marco Elgar page are that (a) in it, Elgar gives the impression that he was trying to reconstruct a cipher system he had used as a much younger man; and (b) there was some kind of underlying symmetry to the letter-to-glyph assignments in that cipher that he simply could not remember.
So, although there are good reasons we should all be aware of the inconsistency between accounts, Ernst’s move to a full-fat hoaxed-by-Dora theory seems somewhat pessimistic and extravagant to me.
As an aside, I think it would be a good exercise to analyze the Liszt Fragment and the Dorabella Cipher to see if they are consistent or inconsistent with each other (e.g. by comparing letter contact tables etc).
Another commenter (ShadowWolf) used the same Klaus post to put forward his/her own Dorabella decrypt (which, perhaps almost inevitably, involves a cipher-style first pass and a this-is-what-Elgar-really-meant-by-that interpretational second pass, Eric Sams-style):
Plaintext:
PBS AFT DALYRENCE MEET B BECO YOUR IDEDTD ALWASE
E STUNDER E THINC OLL OR IS IT HIS CH GUISE
THNIC ABU IT ACOAMessage:
Problems after dalliance meet is because your identity always
a stutter I think all or is it his charming guise?
Think about it acolyte.
In a similar vein, Cipher Mysteries readers may possibly recall that I posted about Allan Gillespie’s Dorabella Cipher theory back in 2013: his (somewhat hybridized) theory was that the plaintext began “ForlE Malvern Link”, the encipherment used a Vigenère cipher system, but (not entirely unlike Thomas Ernst’s theory) it had been “concocted by someone other than Elgar (possibly in the run-up to WWII when GC&CS were recruiting; possibly with Dora Powell’s connivance, more likely not)“.
Another Dorabella solver is Mark Pitt, a Cleveland police officer “with an MA in crime patterns” who has already had the oxygen of publicity in the Times, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and Guardian (to name but four). Pitt has also claimed to have decrypted the Liszt fragment: his solution for both seems to be based around Schooling’s cipher that Elgar famously cracked, with the key “PRUDENTIA”. I suspect Pitt has a (not very active) Twitter account, but that’s just my hunch. A (paywalled) Telegraph article on him from early 2019 is here.
The Two Massey Observations
Finally, a very different take on the Dorabella Cipher has been put forward by Keith Massey in an 11-minute YouTube video from 2017 (but which I only stumbled upon recently), based on two very specific observations.
His first observation is that the Dorabella Cipher contains long sequences of glyphs where no two adjacent glyphs have the same number of loops. Specifically, the first line has a sequence with 12 loop-number-differing glyphs in a row; the second line has a sequence with 9 loop-number-differing glyphs in a row; while the third line has a sequence with 8 loop-number-differing glyphs in a row; all three sequences are near the start of their respective lines. Massey’s control experiments (two of them, which one might reasonably argue is a little bit lightweight) each yielded a single maximum of only 5 or 6 loop-number-differing glyphs in a row. (A more Oranchek-esque researcher would surely have done the experiment by anagramming the Dorabella a billion times over, but I suspect the results would have been not wildly dissimilar.)
Massey’s second observation is that the Dorabella Cipher contains way too many pairs of opposed symbols (i.e. where a glyph is immediately followed by a glyph with its same basic shape but where that second shape is rotated by 180 degrees). Massey calculates that this should on average ~5.3 times for 87 characters, but it instead occurs 12 times.
If we assume all 24 shapes are equally likely to occur (which isn’t true) across the Dorabella’s 87 characters, the probability of 13 exact opposites occurring is ((1/24)^13)*((23/24)^(87-1-13)), which Google tells me is 5.1046414e-20 (i.e. about one in twenty billion billion). Again, a more realistic (i.e. Oranchakian) way of doing this would be to anagram the ciphertext billions of times and see how often twelve exact opposites occur (i.e. using the actual distribution rather than an ideal [perfectly flat] distribution). My prediction here is that the probability there would still be no higher than one in a billion billion, so I believe this too is likely to be a statistically significant result.
Massey thinks the final nail in the Dorabella’s cryptological coffin is that these two patterns don’t overlap: he believes that
Massey’s overall conclusion is that that Elgar created the Dorabella Cipher as nonsense text to resemble a ciphertext as a joke on Dora Penny, but that this nonsense text eventually escaped to become a joke on all of us.
Even if you disagree with the full strength of his conclusion, I suspect these two Massey observations will prove difficult for anybody proposing a simple MASC as a solution (albeit typically with an interpretational second phase) to satisfactorily account for what we see in the Dorabella Cipher.
Thoughts and Conclusions
I have to say that I’m very largely with Keith Massey here, insofar as he is pointing out statistical features of the Dorabella Cipher that are highly improbable. It is almost impossible not to see that these sit awkwardly with the traditionalist (one might call it ‘Samsian‘) reading of the cryptogram’s system as a pigpen-style simple substitution cipher applied to an idiosyncratic Elgarian nonsense-wonsense text. It would be good if Massey’s observations were to be confirmed in a more statistically robust manner, but I would be surprised if the actual results proved to be vastly different.
My own suspicion (just as in 2013) remains that the Dorabella Cipher may turn out to be a stegotext visually concealing a guessable personal message (e.g. “FORLI MALVERN”) rather than a cryptotext mathematically concealing a plaintext. And I believe this is far from inconsistent with Massey’s observations, though only for the left hand half of the three lines.
But even so, I’m really not at all convinced that his observations hold true for the Liszt Fragment, which I believe was written in the same “VERY OLD CYPHER” that Elgar was trying to reconstruct in the Marco Elgar page.
So there is perhaps still work to be done on a genuine Elgar cipher here, even if Massey has indeed managed to nail down the Dorabella MASC coffin (and all credit to him if he has!).
The 18 characters Liszt Fragment may be another friendly joke as it has a 8 and 9 loop-number-differing glyph sequence. 🙂
Jarlve: ah, yes, that’s a good point. 🙂
Hello Nick!
Why the letter of your current article and the wikipedia letter, apparently from your blog, are also different?
Ruby: well spotted! I accidentally posted a copy of a fake Dorabella Cipher that was (as I recall) made for a 2014 exhibition at the Elgar Museum (the word “July” is nice and legible in the fake one, but it’s scrawly and Elgarian in the real one).
I’ve now replaced it with a copy of the real one, thanks for pointing it out! 🙂
If I understood correctly, all the solutions were made in English? It could not be a little love poem in Latin or Italian?
Nick,
You mention my 2013 solution. In my full solution dated June 2015 (https://www.gilliemusic.co.uk/whodunnit), the pre-WWII cryptographer’s name is ‘revealed’ as J. Tiltman.
Best
Allan G.
Hello Nick!
Elgar uses in his letter an alliteration. Do you believe that in his “encrypted” note, he could have done the same thing ? There is, perhaps, in the text a consonant abnormally overrepresented ?
In addition to that, the first two lines have the same end, is it a rhyme?
Hopefully book out in 2020.
M. Pitt
You need not bother. There is no “musical score” and Elgar and Dora Penny had no “scandal”
Although I disagree about Massey’s conclusion that the DBC was some kind of joke, his observations about the glyph orientations are correct and have some connection to the theory I’ve been putting together. Another interesting analysis to perform would be to look at the numbers of loops in sequence ignoring their orientations.
Also look at how the symbols generally lean to the right and very few symbols leaning the other way. I believe Elgar did this in order to create a connection to handwriting in Dora Penny’s mind.. Did Dora Penny ever read the Secrets in Cipher series? I don’t believe that has been stated anywhere but we do know from Bauer’s Unsolved that she had an interest in Morse Code so Elgar quite possibly suggested she read it.
Perhaps not “I believe” but it seems like quite a possibility. I’ve been updating my page, now at: https://jamesmulliss.wordpress.com/a-new-approach/
I will be adding some more observations soon.
Regarding the Liszt fragment, I wrote a program to scan Project Gutenberg files that match the 18 letter pattern ‘ABCDECFGBHIDCBIJKL’. I have about 54,000 files and found 3 exact matches:
osetheirslatesandp
horburygotabroadin
cendingwehadnearly
If you are willing to ignore the last 2 letters, an interesting match is:
usethemasnotesof
However, I don’t agree that the pattern has been created correctly
from the document. I convert it as:
ABCDECFGBHIDCBJKLM
Which is to say I agree with everything except that the 11th and 15th symbols are unique.
Running the program on this pattern, I find:
dialmaysinclairego
hetictobequitefran
iedandthegradesofv
milarlysignalizedf
ourcarefulscrutiny
panionsbackinafewd
periorwhendirectly
rsaleandsoplasticw
ytemperatsomething
So the only match that does not have partial words is
our careful scrutiny
Niteowl: nice result, substantially more sensible than “Gets you to joy, and hysterious” etc, very well done! CryptoCrack gets nowhere close (“pretheforisterandw” *sigh*), which I suspect is because the three repeated letters in “our careful scrutiny” (U/R/C) are all far from the front of the ETAOIN frequency list. 🙂
So, what I find particularly intriguing about this is that Project Gutenberg gave you only a single perfect three-word match. Hence I wonder if it might be worth just brute-forcing three whole dictionary words? (From the spacing, it looks as though the first word is three letters long.) I’d be surprised if the number of matches would be greater than ten, most of which would undoubtedly be ‘zygote helicopter hatstand’-style nonsense. Something to consider, anyway! 😉
There is more to my solution than just the plaintext. The key that goes with the plaintext has a symmetrical arrangement of the symbols and key words. In other words, there is no doubt it is correct. Keep in mind, in spite of people insisting otherwise, you can get up to an 80% solution by hand using frequency analysis and some good guesses.
Pay attention to the key with the associated symbols. The key is impossible without a correct decrypt.
https://github.com/ShadowWolf387/DorabellaCipher/blob/master/DorabellaSol.pdf
Also, If you brute force the symmetrical arrangements of the alphabet and symbols, the Liszt fragment turns out to be “GETSUTFKEDHSTEARWP” which is very close to the mistaken “GETS YOU TO JOY, AND HYSTERIOUS”. Elgar as well as his daughter were known to use abbreviations and Elgar in particular liked to mix up and mess with words. (Unsolved!, Bauer and other sources) Also remember if he actually did it during the concert, he did the cipher in his head. Thus most likely a simple key arrangement and not a key word alphabet like the Dorabella cipher.
Massey is full of himself using statistics to prove a point yet basic frequency analysis points at a simple substitution cipher. You can make statistics say what you want except TH appears 3 times in the cipher. In spite of how messed up the words are, that is actually correct.
You have my email address. You could have asked questions and I could explain. At this point, I can even tell you the accuracy of my shotgun hill climber. You would also have to argue with a 95% matching solution from Cryptool2 genetic search.
One idiot made the mistake of calling me delusional. I have 45+ years doing crypto. It is coming up on almost a year since I found the solution and rather than look at the actual complete solluton, all I get is surface observations and feelings. Verify my findings. I dare you. Unlike every other claimed solution I can’t prove mine wrong I’ve spent nearly a year trying. The easiest example is compare the Tim Roberts key with mine. Be sure to unmix the Tim Roberts symbol order.
Hi Nick!
First of all thank you so much for your site. It’s a great.
Have you ever thinking about that the symbols on The Cryptogram Card (those that are above the word ‘Cryptogram’) could be decoded as a word ‘Cryptogram’?
As I see there are 9 eee-shapes. And there are 9 letters in the word ‘Cryptogram. Lets imagine that Elgar had just come up with a cipher while reading this book and he had encrypted the first word that came to hand. The word ‘Cryptogram’.
It’s just a small idea…
Your observations and Massey’s are all very interesting. However, you don’t calculate the probabilities of Massey’s noted anomalies correctly. For example, the probability of any particular symbol being adjacent to its mirror is not 1/24 = 4.2%. Half the symbols have two mirrors, so the probability of a given symbol being followed by its mirror is 6.3%. Your formula for calculating the aggregate probability of X instances is dramatically incorrect; and then you suggest that a more “realistic” (Orenchakian) way is a Monte Carlo method, generating lots of synthetic ciphers. Really, there is a basic formula of probability for driving right to the solution – the binomial distribution. And the probability of 13 successes in 87 trials at 6.3% is about 0.00185 – one in 539, not one in billionths of billionths.
Moreover, you can’t observe phenomena in a text and then ask, “What are the odds of that?” If you throw a dart at a wall and you ask what the probability was of hitting the point that you hit, you get ~zero, but of course, it was going to hit some point. All texts are going to have anomalous-looking phenomena and asking, after noticing them, what the a priori probability of the observed ones are is misleading.
Moreover, the observed anomalies may pertain to the non-randomness of the text; suppose, for example, that the mirrored pairs consist of vowel-consonant pairs in the plaintext.
And yet moreover, suppose that Elgar chose the encoding with a desire to make certain phenomena appear in the cipher rather than chose the encoding first and then encoded.
And yet another: Massey makes much of the fact that the mirroring occurs in the portions of the cipher where the non-sequentiality of bump counts does not occur, but the two phenomena are mutually exclusive! Anywhere the one does not occur is much more likely for the other one to occur.
All told, his and yours are definitely invaluable observations, but the handling of statistics here is incorrect and leads to some pointed conclusions that are not merited. Massey’s observed phenomena could plausibly occur at random. Still, it’s a great kind of observation to make, and it may mean something, but it doesn’t mean that this is not a real cipher.
John Rehling: why do you think some Dorabella symbols have more than a single mirror?
You are correct about the binomial expansion, which at 13 from 87 at 4.2% would seem to instead point to odds of 1 in 18480 or so.
As a separate correspondent also once pointed out, if Elgar had constructed a cipher key where high frequency pairs in the plaintext (e.g. ES, TH) were represented by pairs of mirrored shapes, then he could have easily amassed 13 such pairs across three lines. But… this seems a bit of a stretch to me.
All the same, it might well be that Massey’s observation is the right place to start attacking the Dorabella Cipher, because the odds would seem to be high enough to be annoying but apparently not high enough to be a complete showstopper.
Actually, 87 letters yields 86 adjacency decisions, so the calculation (13 from 86 etc) would seem to be closer to 1 in 20815.
Hi Nick,
In Massey’s video, at 7:06 – 7:34 he explains how, for his purposes, half of the symbols have two mirrors.
I agree that Massey’s observations are excellent to have in hand before making an attack. I disagree with his conclusion that his observations mean that there is no message. I don’t know if we can conclude either way whether the mirror pairs indicate: (1) A very unlikely phenomenon that nonetheless occurred; (2) Reflect an idiosyncrasy of the encoding that was not necessarily intentional (such as consonant-vowel pairs); (3) Reflect an idiosyncrasy of the encoding that was intended (such as if Elgar wanted the cipher to have those mirror pairs, desiring the visual effect that they create, and chose his symbol encodings to bring that about).
John Rehling: it’s a year since I last watched Massey’s video, but watching it again it seems to be the case that he presents two different types of ‘mirroring’ (well, one mirroring and one rotating by 180 degrees), but only actually runs with the latter. I don’t think I can stretch the raw stats to include both types of mirroring at the same time, so I think 1 in 24 (i.e. 4.2%) isn’t really up for renegotiation, much as the higher figure would reduce the level of improbability to a rather more manageable level. So I believe we’re stuck with a 1 in 20815 figure here.
All the same, I am kind of sympathetic, in that this figure is based on only 13 ‘mirrored’ (i.e. rotated 180 degree) pairs, albeit clustered in a fairly artificial manner (particularly on the middle line). So it’s not impossible that this either ‘just happened that way’, or that Elgar crafted the cipher key around the text to achieve a certain kind of funky / improbable-looking result.
And yet… the fat cluster of non-repeating shapes at the start of the first line is exactly the kind of thing you see when encipherers sequentially allocate random shapes to a cipher key as they’re starting to construct a one-off cipher. So in some ways Keith Massey is also flagging a very typical simple substitution cipher ‘smell’. But even though it looks like a MASC, and smells like a MASC, it has all those mirrored pairs too.
At the very least, I do wonder whether Massey’s cluster of mirror pairs at the end of the middle line are nothing more complex than decoration / padding. So it might be that we have to remove this padding before the cryptogram becomes actually solvable. (Note that I haven’t actually tried this, so as normal it is left as an exercise for the reader.)
I’d like to throw a couple, possibly new, observations into the mix… There are 22 characters after the dot in the third line. Including that dot, there are 88 characters in total. One character after the period for every three before. What if it’s a scramble first and then a substitution? And that huge dot over the seven. Does that suggest the cipher be rotated or flipped horizontally or vertically?
I read that Elgar had a dog named Marco before he got married, then had another dog named Marco after his wife died. If this is true, then the “Marco Elgar” cipher could represent Elgar’s first attempts at his cipher. The “Very Old Cypher” would then represent the simplicity of the substitution that he wanted to build upon.
https://dogs-in-history.blogspot.com/2019/12/sir-edward-elgar-and-his-much-wanted.html
Nick, first off, thanks for this awesome treasure trove website for unsolved ciphers! Always something interesting to read and explore further!
I’ve recently started analyzing the Dorabella Cipher and it is fascinating. A couple of my observations/thoughts so far.
1. If this cipher is ever cracked, I believe it will only come after a thorough understanding of Edward Elgar’s psyche. A good point to start this process would be studying the books “Letters of a Lifetime” by Elgar and Dora Penny’s book “Memories of a Variation” to get some idea of Elgar’s communication style and usage of the English language. The study of John Holt Schooling’s 1896 Pall Mall four-part series on ciphers, which we know Elgar read and perhaps influenced his cipher writing is another must read.
2. As many have noted before, it is hard to understand that Elgar’s cipher to Dora Penny was constructed in such a sophisticated way that she would have no hope of decrypting it. Perhaps, Elgar was hoping Dora would approach him later and ask him to tell her the meaning of the cipher or give her some decryption tips. Maybe this did happen, and the note was of a private nature that Miss Penny never disclosed publicly (?).
3. Personally, I haven’t yet seen a solution that makes sense to me. I believe Elgar may have liberally used some of his quirky personal slang in this cipher. This adds a level of difficulty to breaking it, but hopefully, a study of Elgar from contemporary sources as mentioned above will help with this.
4. I do not believe the encryption is as complex as some have made it out to be. There seems to be no logical point for Elgar to do so, considering who the cipher was sent to. But it’s good to keep an open mind and consider a more complex encryption!