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Dorabella Cipher
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== Background == Dora Penny (1874β1964) was the daughter of the Reverend Alfred Penny (1845β1935) of [[Wolverhampton]]. Dora's mother died in February 1874, six days after giving birth to Dora, after which her father worked for many years as a missionary in [[Melanesia]]. In 1895 Dora's father remarried, and Dora's stepmother was a friend of [[Caroline Alice Elgar]]. In July 1897 the Penny family invited Edward and Alice Elgar to stay at the Wolverhampton Rectory for a few days. Edward Elgar was a forty-year-old music teacher who had yet to become a successful composer. Dora Penny was 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 [[Enigma Variations|''Variations on an Original Theme'' (Enigma)]] ''Dorabella'' as a dedication to Dora Penny. On returning to [[Great Malvern]] on 14 July 1897 Alice wrote a letter of thanks to the Penny family. Edward Elgar inserted a note with cryptic writing: 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 by [[Methuen Publishing]] in 1937. Subsequently, the original note was lost.{{citation needed|date=August 2021}} Dora claimed that she had never been able to read the note, which she assumed to be a cipher message. Composer and historian Kevin Jones advanced one view; <blockquote> Dora's father had just returned from Melanesia where he had been a missionary for many years. Fascinated by local language and culture, he possessed a few traditional talismans decorated with arcane glyphs. Perhaps such an item surfaced as a conversation piece during the Elgars' week in Wolverhampton? And if Dora recalled this when writing her memoirs, it might account for the fact the coded message was referred to as an 'inscription' when communicating with the director of SOAS many years later.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/interact/puzzles/dorabellacode.shtml |title=BBC β Proms β The Dorabella Code<!-- Bot generated title --> |access-date=2009-11-10 |archive-date=2012-03-16 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120316162757/http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/interact/puzzles/dorabellacode.shtml |url-status=dead }}</ref></blockquote> The Dorabella Cipher is not the only document penned by Elgar that contains the approximately semi-circular characters. At a concert in April 1886 (over ten years prior to his letter to Penny), he annotated a concert program with 18 similar characters followed by an underscore. This fragment became known as the "Liszt fragment". The symbols also appear in a 1920s notebook of Elgar, along with diagrams resembling clock faces, and on the so-called "Cryptogram card", which forms part of a series of cards detailing Elgar's solution to a cryptographic challenge set in ''Pall Mall'' magazine in 1896.<ref>{{cite book |last=Bauer |first=Craig |date=2017 |title=Unsolved! The History and Mystery of the World's Greatest Ciphers from Ancient Egypt to Online Secret Societies |publisher=Princeton University Press |page=127 |isbn=978-0691167671}} </ref>
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