Is Kate Beaton the best? Kate Beaton is still the best.
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The STORE page has been updated with Rocklove’s Sailor Twain jewelry. Check it out, if you haven’t already!
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Now about our 19th century letter-writing exploration: what about secret messages?
They were in fashion throughout the 1800′s. Like this one from Victorian Rituals:
This example of a cryptogram was headed Female Ingenuity and was used by a newly married young lady who was obliged to show her husband all the letters she wrote.
I cannot be satisfied, my dearest friend;
blest as I am in the matrimonial state,
unless I pour into your friendly bosom,
which has ever been in unison with mine,
the various sensations which swell
with the liveliest emotions of pleasure,
my almost bursting heart. I tell you my dear
husband is the most amiable of men.
I have now been married seven weeks, and
have found the least reason to
repent the day that joined us.
My husband is
in person and manners far from resembling
ugly, cross, old, disagreeable and jealous
monsters, who think by confining to secure a wife;
it is his maxim to treat,
as a bosom friend and confidant, and not
as a plaything or menial slave, the woman
chosen to be his companion. Neither party,
he says should always obey implicitly;
but each yield to the other by turns.
The letter’s message was:
I cannot be satisfied, my dearest friend,
unless I pour into your friendly bosom,
the various sensations which swell
my almost bursting heart. I tell you my dear
I have now been married seven weeks, and
repent the day that joined us.
My husband is
ugly, cross, old, disagreeable and jealous.
It is his maxim to treat
as a plaything or menial slave; the woman
he says, should always obey implicitly.
... Though this is not quite as witty nor as titillating as George Sand’s naughty crypto-poem, which fellow twainer Sam shared and decyphered in earlier comments (for our French readers.)
And then there was the REBUS, which was very popular too. A simple example, and more on the subject from a site at King’s College in Cambridge:
It reads, “Dear little Ginny…”
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Sometime around 5th and 6th grade I remember creating elaborate codes and cyphers to write letters in. For some reason, I remember neither what I encoded, what the code was, or who I sent them to. That’s strange.
Have you ever written or received a letter in secret code? Care to share?
Not so much secret code, but I remember trying to make my own langauge once as a kid. No linguistic basics and tied foundation, just….random words in place of others. “Look a mermaid!” might be “Stil il polsiu!” It kept me entertained during middle school I suppose. :3
Thanks Zelly! I did that too! When I was very young I was busily replacing spoken languages with my own brand. Apparently the words were consistent, to the point some grown-ups were getting worried. But to this day, the names for my mother and father—respectively “Bouloule” and “Bikou”—still fit them better than anything else they’ve been called.
i loved codes as a kid! i can never get enough good puzzles, whether i can solve them or not.
i do remember reading an artemis fowl book (by eoin colfer, i think) when i was in about fifth grade and being vastly more entertained by deciphering the encrypted message that ran on the bottoms of pages throughout the book, than i ever was by the actual story.
also, i’m very excited that dear twain has got his hands on this book at last.
I noticed that the Stowaways’ and the Mermaid’s eyes share some distinct stylistic qualities. Is this intentional or simply a result of how you draw the eyes of children?
By the way, I love the way you darkened Twain’s face in the last two panels. It says a lot by showing so little.
Anyway, as for secret codes, I developed a truly impressive one when I was ten-or-so.
It was fairly simple, actually, but it was very difficult to crack. I can’t remember exactly how it worked, but I had a system that would read differently based on where line breaks were applied. That way, if anyone cracked the base level, I could strategically apply line breaks to throw them off the scent.
…
It was exclusively used to discuss vulgar things with my sister.
I have no regrets.
I made advanced coded ways of writing languages, with unique punctuation and rules about how to combine certain letters, think ‘æ’, although usually it was applied more to ‘th’ and ‘ei’ and occasionally to whole words like ‘it’ and ‘the’.
I always tried to get my friends to write in these languages, and occasionally we would for a day, but nothing would stick.
I actually still make them, but now it’s usually related to story telling efforts.
Thanks, Ella, Z80 and KP!
Z80: yes, the eyes, when all is done, should have stories to tell all their own.
CODES: if anyone finds some more juicy examples of coded 19th century letters, do share also.
There’s one curious item, a cyphered letter by the composer Edward Elgar, probably a love letter—but no one has ever cracked the code: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorabella_Cipher
I became interested in steganography about a decade ago, and wrote a program that used it to embed text into the data of a digital image. Worked a treat and didn’t show any distortion in the image’s histogram. That’s because all I did was tweak the least significant bit of the image; and when you’re working with 24-bit color, that represents a difference of about 1 in 16-some million.
Wiki on steganography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
As for other attempts with language – I tried my own cipher as well, at about ten or so, but eventually dropped it because I really didn’t feel like memorizing a whole new alphabet. However, I had a couple of friends who seriously got into Tolkein’s dwarfish runes.
For a novel I wrote a few years back, I actually did end up creating a language, though not an alien one; it’s a human language derived from a lot of current languages, which made it much easier to do. (And I made it inflected, which gave it a more predictable syntax and a natural rhyme and meter that I liked quite a lot.)
The tricky part was inventing the glyphs, since there were phonetic agglutinates. I ended up with about 60 characters in all, and developed a typeface for them that was a combination of Greek and Cyrillic.
Really actually quite a lot of fun.
As for codes, and illustrations, there’s always the Voynich manuscipt to wonder and puzzle about.
… and somehow the link disappeared (how mysterious). Let me try again
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript
Whoa, I remember there being a general cipher craze in my class in about fifth grade too. Lots of kids made their own ciphers and wrote secret messages to each other. At around the age of twelve children start developing their abstract thinking and their reasoning ability. It’s a remarkable development – I’ve worked with children this age and one year they cannot grasp anything beyond the simplest cause and effect, and the next they can think several steps ahead and make (somewhat) sensible decisions based on that.
Perhaps the cipher craze is a symptom of this mental development. The child realises that the letters are just arbitrary symbols for sounds, that there is no logical or scientifical way to derive the sound [a] from the grapheme A, so one might as well just replace one symbol with another.
I wonder, do Chinese children also make their own ciphers? Can you even do ciphers in a symbol-based written language, or do they play with their signs in some other way?
In my experience, those who maintain their fascination with ciphers and rebuses often turn out to be good abstract thinkers as well.
When I was in middle school I invented my own alphabet and a few words of my own language, but quickly gave up on both of them. In high school I learned to read Anglo Saxon runes semi-fluidly and invented my own alphabet which I still occasionally use even now.
Wow, Klaus, that Voynich is a fascinating one. An unbroken cypher is such a tantalizing thing.
Thanks, Pip. Yeah, that’s a curio about Chinese characters. In a way, Chinese characters are elaborate codes, and in the case of poetry, meant to be read in multiple, interlocking meanings. Advance stuff, in other words!
And EpeeGnome, worthy of Tolkien!
Pip:
“I wonder, do Chinese children also make their own ciphers? Can you even do ciphers in a symbol-based written language, or do they play with their signs in some other way?”
I would imagine they do, since every language (written), including this one, is symbol-based on one level or another. Each Chinese pictogram represents a single phoneme, so I would imagine it would be trivial (relatively) for a bright kid to just draw a different picture for each sound. That’s all any of the rest of us did.
Warren:
I’m not sure if creating a cipher for Chinese would be quite so simple. Each character represents a phoneme (several phonemes, really), but there are many characters for the same sound. The derivation of the characters, and more importantly the understanding of them by a Chinese speaker/writer, is based on meaning, not direct conversion to verbal form. It’s an interesting question. For those of us with an understanding of writing based on a phonetic alphabet, the concept of a cipher is obvious. But to a child learning a system of pictograms, it might not be so. Spoken homophones can have very different writings, and when you throw in intonation, there’s a lot of potential for hilarious punnage (see Grass-Mud-Horse.) It becomes even more interesting with Japanese, in which you have two phonetic alphabets, derived from cursive writings of Chinese characters, and a set of pictograms taken directly from Chinese. Since the pictograms were transferred to an entirely unrelated language, there are multiple readings for each character, and some words aren’t phonetic at all. Since kids learn the 2 phonetic kana alphabets first, a cipher would be as easy as in English, but in a language like the all-character kanji system, which in itself is essentially a code, a cipher may not be feasible.
Really fascinating question, Pip. It’d be interesting if there were a study on children playing with pictoral languages….