This repository hosts my investigation of the Dorabella cipher — the note of 87 glyphs that Edward Elgar sent to Dora Penny on 14 July 1897, unsolved to this day. The write-up is served via GitHub Pages at https://bugfishtm.github.io/cipher-dorabella. It covers what I read about the note, Elgar, his other ciphers and every published attempt, and what I did myself: my own transcription, the snowflake-key idea, the measurements, the long-running server hunt, and what is left to try. A separate page lists every attempt with an honest verdict on whether it was worth the time.
The site also carries my browser toolkit (docs/toolkit/): a seven-phase decipher tool with a calibrated annealing solver and key hunt, a transposition bench, string experiments and an encipher tool. All of them run on the same polar-key engine, which is covered by 4,049 test assertions. The site also documents the Python lab and the 108-million-candidate server hunt behind the other numbers it quotes. The short version: a regular rotating key is ruled out (p = 0.0003), a plain substitution of English is ruled out (z = −7.5 to −9.6 at matched effort), and the note is still unread.
Please note: This is a private project. The source code is public only because it is part of my project infrastructure — GitHub Pages requires the repository content to be accessible. This is not an open-source project, not a template, and not intended for reuse.
This table provides an overview of the key files and folders of the project.
| Path | Description |
|---|---|
| docs/ | The investigation website, served via GitHub Pages. |
| docs/index.html | Home page — case status, the argument in six lines, section overview. |
| docs/01-note.html … 04-record.html | Background, what I read — the note, Edward Elgar, his other ciphers, the published record. |
| docs/05-transcription.html … 11-next.html | Investigation, what I did — my transcription, the snowflake key, measurements, what I tried, the long hunt, what cipher it is, what to do next. |
| docs/08-attempts.html | Every attempt in the order I made it, with a verdict: worth it, dead end, lesson, open, or deliberately not done. |
| docs/12-sources.html | Everything I read, the image gallery with licences, and my own working images. |
| docs/13-workbench.html | Workbench — encipher, decipher and crib-test in the browser. |
| docs/toolkit/ | The interactive toolkit, built from my sources: decipher, transpose, experiments, encipher — plus the archived first versions (snowflake-v1.html, workbench-v1.html). |
| docs/assets/ | Stylesheet, scripts, the cipher engine, the transcription data and all images — everything served locally. |
| LICENSE.md | License of this project. |
You are welcome to browse the code, read the investigation and try the tools. However:
- All rights are reserved. No permission is granted to copy, reuse, modify or redistribute any part of this repository — code, design, texts or data — unless explicitly stated otherwise in LICENSE.md.
- Third-party images keep their own licences. The Wikimedia Commons files are CC BY 3.0 or CC BY-SA 4.0, and Elgar's own documents are in the public domain. Each one is credited on the sources page (
docs/12-sources.html). - This repository does not accept feature requests, and contributions are generally not expected — it exists to document my own work on the cipher.
The license for this project can be found in the LICENSE.md file. The repository may also include additional licensed software or libraries.
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