The Secret Code of Beatrix Potter
As codes go, Potter’s wasn’t inordinately complicated. As Wiltshire explains, it was a “mono-alphabetic substitution cipher code,” in which each letter of the alphabet was replaced by a symbol—the kind of thing they teach you in Cub Scouts. The real trouble was Potter’s own fluency with it. She quickly learned to write the code so fast that each sheet looked, even to Linder’s trained eye, like a maze of scribbles.
EDITED TO ADD (7/13): Here’s an example of what it looked like.
SJM • June 23, 2017 2:30 PM
Isn’t this some kind of security by obfuscation? I mean, if the content of those journals had some kind of relevance at all, it would have been decoded way faster than that. Still impressive she could coherently write so fast with that kind of cipher!