the dorabella cipher

• to: dorabella penny
• from: edward elgar
• dated: july 14, 1897

the dorabella cipher is an enciphered letter written by composer edward elgar to dora penny. penny never deciphered it and its meaning remains unknown.

— edward elgar was a forty-year-old music teacher who had yet to become a successful composer, dora penny almost seventeen years his junior. edward and dora liked one another and remained friends for the rest of the composer's life - elgar named variation 10 of his 1899 variations on an original theme (enigma) dorabella as a dedication to dora penny.

in 1897 elgar's wife alice wrote a letter of thanks to the penny family. edward elgar, a renowned lover of ciphers, inserted a note with cryptic writing into the letter: he pencilled the name 'miss penny' on the reverse.

this note lay in a drawer for forty years and became generally known when dora had it reproduced in her memoir edward elgar: memories of a variation, published in 1937. subsequently, the original note was lost. dora claimed that she had never been able to read the note, which she assumed to be a cipher message.

➯ proposed solutions

musicologist eric sams proposed a solution in 1970:

❝ STARTS: LARKS! IT'S CHAOTIC, BUT A CLOAK OBSCURES MY NEW LETTERS, A, B [alpha, beta, ie greek letters or alphabet] BELOW: I OWN THE DARK MAKES E. E. SIGH WHEN YOU ARE TOO LONG GONE. ❞

— the length of this text is 109 letters (ignoring the parenthetic note on the greek), whereas the original text contains only 87 or 88 characters: sams claimed the surplus letters are implied by phonetic shorthand.

cryptographer enthusiast richard henderson proposed the following solution:

❝ whY AM I VERY SAD, BELLE. I SAG AS WE SEE ROSES DO. E.E. IS EVER FOND OF U, DORA. I kNOw I PeN ONE I LOVe. All Of My Affection. ❞

henderson claimed to have found the correct clear text, encoded once again as a simple substitution cipher (with two letters as nulls), although some details remain to be worked out.

as mentioned above, the cipher remains decidedly unsolved.