Dorabella Cipher - Background

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 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 folded 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;

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 Elgar's 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.

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".