Dickens, the English writer whose books include A Tale of Two Cities, Tears of the Orphan, and A Christmas Carol, wrote a shorthand letter called The Tavistock Letter in 1859, which has been kept at the Morgan Library in the United States cum in the museum, since the letters were written in his own shorthand (The Devil’s Handwriting), their contents might not be deciphered for over a century.
The director of the museum, Philip Palmer, regarded Dickens’s The Tavistock Letter as an unsolved mystery, but it was finally successfully cracked by foreign netizens earlier. The Tavistock Letter was difficult to understand before because Dickens used shorthand with lines and simple symbols. In order to decipher the content of the letter, some scholars launched The Dickens Code project in October last year, giving a prize of 300 pounds to those who can successfully decipher the content of the letter. The result attracted more than 1,000 people from all over the world to challenge.
Shane Baggs, a 55-year-old American computer expert, saw The Dickens Code project in the Reddit discussion area, and decided to give it a try. With the help of a computer and Dickens Fans, he successfully deciphered The Tavistock Letter written by a bunch of lines and symbols. , and made public when Dickens died at the age of 210. The outside world thought that the letter contained Dickens’ unpublished works. In fact, it was a complaint letter he sent to the editor-in-chief of the British “Times” at that time, expressing that he hoped that the advertisement of his new book in the newspaper would be rejected, and he hoped to find an acquaintance to help solve it.
Data and picture sources:The Dickens Code
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