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The Dorabella Cipher is an enciphered letter written by composer Edward Elgar to Dora Penny, which was accompanied by another dated July 14, 1897. Penny never deciphered it and its meaning remains unknown. The cipher, consisting of 87 characters spread over 3 lines, appears to be made up from 24 symbols, each symbol consisting of 1, 2, or 3 approximate semicircles oriented in one of 8 directions (the orientation of several characters is ambiguous). A small dot appears after the fifth character on the third line. == Background == Dora Penny (1874-1964) was the daughter of the Reverend Alfred Penny (1845-1935) of Wolverhampton. Dora's mother had 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 ''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. Dora claimed that she had never been able to read the note, which she assumed to be a cipher message. Kevin Jones advanced one view;
Elgar was interested in ciphers: the Elgar Birthplace Museum preserves four articles from ''Pall Mall'' magazine of 1896 entitled ''Secrets in Cipher'' and a wooden box that Elgar painted with his solution to a cipher that the fourth of these articles had presented as an insoluble "nihilist cipher". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Dorabella Cipher」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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