Dora Penny was not called Dorabella when the note reached her. She acquired that name about fourteen months later, in September 1898, and she got it from Mozart. The message everyone now calls the Dorabella cipher was written, sent and filed away before the nickname it carries had been invented.
The name on the sheet, at the time, was hers: Miss Penny.
That is not a reconstruction. It comes from the woman herself, in the book she published in 1937 under her married name, Mrs. Richard Powell: Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation (Oxford University Press). The cipher sits in its Appendix, at page 98, the last numbered page of the book. Every quotation below can be checked against the page it came from, because the whole first edition has been scanned and is public.
The order of events is the part that gets lost:
| When |
What happened |
| April 1896 |
John Holt Schooling publishes a cipher challenge in The Pall Mall Magazine and declares it "will never be solved by any one" |
| 14 July 1897 |
Elgar dates and sends the sheet of symbols to the Penny household at Wolverhampton |
| September 1898 |
Elgar calls Dora "my sweet Dorabella" at a Gloucester Festival party, quoting Mozart |
| 1937 |
Powell prints the facsimile in her memoir and asks readers to solve it |
Key Takeaways
- Powell records that "on the back of it is written, 'Miss Penny'". The nickname was not attached to the note when Elgar sent it.
- The name arrived in September 1898, when Elgar asked her stepmother "How is my sweet Dorabella?" and explained it was "a quotation from Mozart's Così fan tutte" (Powell, p. 11).
- Under the symbols, in ordinary handwriting rather than in the symbol alphabet, Elgar wrote a date: "July 14. 97".
- It was not enclosed in a letter from Elgar. Powell writes that it "came to me enclosed in a letter from the Lady to my mother" (p. 98), the Lady being Alice Elgar.
- Powell printed the facsimile herself, in her own lifetime, and asked her readers to solve it.
Why is it called the Dorabella cipher?
Because of a dinner-party remark made more than a year after the note was written.
Powell tells the story on page 11. In September 1898 her stepmother met the Elgars at Hasfield Court, near Gloucester, at a party for the Gloucester Festival. Elgar took her in to dinner, and Powell records the exchange:
"How is my sweet Dorabella?"
"Oh! So it has got to that, has it?" said my mother.
"That's a quotation from Mozart's Così fan tutte, don't you know it?"
The remark was passed on to Dora by letter. A few days afterwards, she writes, "I had a letter from E. E. with the musical quotation from Così on the back of the envelope." That letter is reproduced in the book and dated Sept. 24. 1898. Immediately below it Powell writes one flat sentence: "Ever afterwards I was Dorabella" (p. 12).
So the sequence runs the wrong way round from the way the puzzle is usually introduced. Elgar borrowed an opera character's name for a young friend in the autumn of 1898. Later still, that borrowed name attached itself to a sheet of symbols he had sent in the summer of 1897. The cipher was named retrospectively, after the fact, by association with a nickname that did not yet exist when it was written.
It is worth being precise about what this does and does not tell us. It does not prove the note has nothing to do with Dora Penny, who plainly received it and plainly kept it. It does mean that anyone treating "Dorabella" as a word likely to be hidden inside the message is reading a later label back onto an earlier object.
What is on the Dorabella cipher page
Page 98 of the 1937 edition carries the Appendix text and, below it, the facsimile.
Two things on that page tend to get left out of retellings. The first is the address. Powell writes that "on the back of it is written, 'Miss Penny'" (p. 98). She uses the passive and does not say whose hand wrote it, so the inscription cannot safely be credited to Elgar. What it does show is that the sheet was labelled with her ordinary name rather than any nickname or endearment.
The second is that the sheet is not made entirely of symbols. Under the last row of them, off to the right, Elgar wrote in his normal hand, in ordinary letters and figures, a date: "July 14. 97". It is signed off the way a person signs off a note, and it is the one part of the sheet that anybody can read without a key.
That date is a small thing with real consequences. It fixes the note to a single day rather than to a vague "summer of 1897", and it suggests that concealment for its own sake was not the point. A person hiding a message does not usually date it helpfully in plain text. That reading is an inference from the page rather than anything Powell claims, but it is the natural one: the symbols look aimed at a particular reader at a known moment, not at secrecy in general.
Who did Elgar actually send the note to?
Not, strictly, from Elgar to Dora Penny. Powell is explicit in the Appendix. She calls it "the third letter I had from him, if indeed it is one", and then says it "came to me enclosed in a letter from the Lady to my mother".
Both halves of that sentence matter.
"The Lady" is Alice Elgar. Powell explains the habit on page 12: "Perhaps I should explain that I always spoke of Alice Elgar to E. E. as 'the Lady'." So the covering letter was written by Elgar's wife, and it was addressed to Dora's stepmother, not to Dora.
Her stepmother is the reason the two families knew each other at all. Powell opens the book by dating her first meeting with Elgar to 6 December 1895, when he and Mrs Elgar came to Wolverhampton "at the invitation of my step-mother". Her father had been made Rector of Wolverhampton that spring, and in August had married Mary Frances Baker of Hasfield. Miss Baker had known Caroline Alice Roberts, the future Alice Elgar, since they were young women studying geology together and fossil-hunting on the banks of the Severn.
The older women were the original friendship. Dora, then in her early twenties, was the addition. The National Archives Discovery catalogue records her dates as 1874 to 1964, in an East Sussex Record Office entry that identifies "Mrs Dora Powell (1874-1964), wife of Richard Crofts Powell of Newick, the Dorabella of Elgar's Enigma Variations".
The other half of her sentence is the hedge, and it is easy to skate past. She does not write "the third letter I had from him". She writes "the third letter I had from him, if indeed it is one". Forty years on, the recipient was not prepared to state that the thing was a letter at all.
Powell also has a definite view about what preceded it. The note, she writes, "followed upon their visit to us at Wolverhampton in July 1897", and she points the reader back to page 9 of her own book, where she describes it. The Elgars stayed five days. They drove over to Boscobel and flew kites in the field near King Charles's Oak. There was music at all hours, including sketches for Caractacus, and Powell invented a dance to one of the Bavarian pieces, which Elgar liked enough that she was called on to repeat it. The note came out of a week that had generated a great many private jokes.
Was Elgar any good at ciphers?
He had a documented, checkable reputation for it, and one specific solved puzzle attached to his name in print during his own lifetime.
Robert J. Buckley's Sir Edward Elgar, published by John Lane in 1905 in the Living Masters of Music series, is the first book-length study of him and was written from conversations with him. In the chapter "Edward Elgar To-Day", among a run of details about his habits, Buckley writes that during railway journeys Elgar "amuses himself with cryptograms; solved one by John Holt Schooling who defied the world to unravel his mystery" (p. 41).
Schooling is not a vague reference. John Holt Schooling published a four-part series, "Secrets in Cipher", in The Pall Mall Magazine across the first four months of 1896. Part IV, in the April number, runs from page 608 to page 618 and works through a numerical device it describes as being used by Russian political prisoners, built on a lettered square and a memorised key word, using TYRANT as its worked example. Schooling walks the reader through converting a sample message, "Plot discovered. Burn the Orloff papers in Moscow", into figures. If that kind of device is unfamiliar, the cipher identifier is the quickest way to see what the families of them look like side by side.
Then he closes the whole series with a challenge. He has written the final sentence of Part IV in that cipher, using a key word he does not disclose, and he tells his readers what he thinks of their chances:
"... therefore the meaning of the cipher which now follows will never be solved by any one. The 'box,' which for us has been unlocked to let out the cipher secrets of past centuries, has now closed and firmly shut its fastenings for one hundred years of future time." (p. 618)
That appeared in April 1896. Elgar dated his own sheet of symbols fifteen months afterwards.
Honesty requires one limit here. Buckley does not name which of Schooling's ciphers Elgar solved, and Schooling's closing sentence is only the most conspicuous candidate rather than a confirmed one. The series contains several puzzles. What the two printed sources jointly establish is narrower and still useful: Elgar was reading published cryptography in 1896, he was solving it for entertainment, and a defiance of exactly this kind was in front of him fifteen months before he wrote to the Pennys.
How the Dorabella cipher became public
Dora Powell published it herself, and she did not wait to be asked.
Elgar had died in 1934. Her memoir came out three years later, carrying a preface signed by his daughter Carice Elgar Blake and dated 5 December 1936, and the Appendix ends with an open invitation:
"I have never had the slightest idea what message it conveys; he never explained it and all attempts to solve it have failed. Should any reader of this book succeed in arriving at a solution it would interest me very much to hear of it."
She then lived another twenty-seven years, dying in 1964. The public solving effort therefore began with a direct request from the recipient, published in her own book, while she was alive to receive answers.
The book kept circulating. Open Library's catalogue records the first edition as Oxford University Press, London and New York, 1937, xiii and 98 pages, with a second edition following in 1947 and a Remploy reprint of that second edition in 1979 running to 134 pages with plates. A puzzle that had been a private oddity in one household became, from 1937 onwards, something any reader could hold in their own hands and study for themselves.
She was also capable of turning down a solution she did not believe. In a footnote on page 23, discussing the separate riddle behind the Enigma Variations, she notes that her own husband's proposed answer had been published in Music and Letters in July 1934, calls it "admittedly plausible" and "supported by cogent argument", and then says she has "never found it convincing". Her standard, stated there, was that the right solution would leave "no room for any doubt". She applied it to her husband. It is a fair guess she would have applied it here too.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Dorabella in Mozart, and why did Elgar borrow the name?
Dorabella is one of the two sisters in Mozart's Così fan tutte. Powell records that when Elgar first used it, at a Gloucester Festival dinner in September 1898, her stepmother reacted with "Oh! So it has got to that, has it?", and Elgar answered by naming the opera: "That's a quotation from Mozart's Così fan tutte, don't you know it?" (p. 11). Powell never explains why he chose that particular character, and neither will this article.
Who was Dora Penny?
A rector's daughter from Wolverhampton, born in 1874 and died in 1964, according to the East Sussex Record Office catalogue entry held in The National Archives Discovery database. She met Elgar on 6 December 1895 through her stepmother, Mary Frances Baker, who had been a friend of Alice Elgar since before Alice's marriage. She later married Richard Crofts Powell and published her memoir of Elgar as Mrs. Richard Powell.
Was the cipher sent in a letter from Elgar?
Powell says not. In the Appendix to her memoir she writes that it "came to me enclosed in a letter from the Lady to my mother", meaning a letter written by Alice Elgar and addressed to Dora's stepmother. She also declines to call the enclosure a letter at all, describing it as "the third letter I had from him, if indeed it is one".
Is anything on the sheet readable without solving it?
Yes. Below the symbols, Elgar wrote the date "July 14. 97" in his ordinary handwriting rather than in the symbol alphabet. It is the only part of the page that needs no key, and it fixes the note to a specific day in the summer of 1897.
Where is the original note now?
The present whereabouts of the original sheet are not established by any of the sources cited here. Powell's memoir is the primary record of the note, and her book does not say where she kept it or what she intended should happen to it. What is fixed and checkable is the facsimile she printed at page 98 of the 1937 first edition, which is how the symbols entered public circulation and how they have been reproduced since.
Have a look at the note above again with the date in mind, then try a cipher that does give up its answer over at the Caesar cipher decoder. From there you can work through the rest of the codes, or read more of the Codes and Ciphers stories.
Sources
- Mrs. Richard Powell (Dora M. Penny Powell), Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation, Oxford University Press, London and New York, 1937. Appendix p. 98; also pp. 1, 9, 11, 12 and 23. Full scan, archive.org - retrieved 10 August 2026
- J. Holt Schooling, "Secrets in Cipher, Part IV", The Pall Mall Magazine, Vol. VIII, No. 36, April 1896, pp. 608-618. archive.org - retrieved 10 August 2026
- Robert J. Buckley, Sir Edward Elgar, Living Masters of Music series, John Lane: The Bodley Head, London and New York, 1905, chapter V, p. 41. archive.org - retrieved 10 August 2026
- The National Archives, Discovery catalogue, East Sussex and Brighton and Hove Record Office, ref. AMS5785/20. nationalarchives.gov.uk - retrieved 10 August 2026
- Open Library edition record, Edward Elgar: memories of a variation, Oxford University Press 1937. openlibrary.org - retrieved 10 August 2026
