- [Narrator] It can sometimes feel
like the Victorians had a lot of hobbies.
(grunts) (bright piano music)
Sports, arts, sciences, judging.
(crowd boos) But perhaps the weirdest
of their national pastimes involved sending coded love notes
to each other through newspaper ads.
Yes, that's right.
The thing you thought was just fiction
in "Enola Holmes" is actually real.
And we're really going to decipher
some Victorian love letters, right now.
(clicking) (bright piano music)
Now, if you were randomly shouting out places
where public displays of affection were acceptable,
you probably wouldn't shout "Victorian England," would you?
For good reason.
Not only were they so buttoned up
that women had to wear jungle gyms on their bodies.
- They will make me look like that truly unlikely thing.
My lady! (elegant string music)
- [Narrator] But they also had
so many rules around courtship
that you almost needed a law degree to flirt.
Obviously, when in public,
women couldn't introduce themselves to a man
or have more than one glass (cork pops)
of champagne. (fizzing)
But naturally, contact in close quarters
such as carriages was heavily regulated too,
and mostly forbidden without family to chaperone.
And then there was just strange stuff,
like a woman could only give a man a handmade gift.
That's not on my wishlist.
So given all that social distancing...
- Hello.
- Please get out of this carriage.
- [Narrator] Maybe it's not surprising
that Victorian lovers invented (kissing)
really roundabout methods of flirting.
They put pickup lines on calling cards
and created a silent language of flirtation
with personal fans,
like they were sailors using semaphore.
But my favorite example is still their habit
of sending love letters to each other through newspaper ads.
It's a section of the paper with a memorable name,
the agony column. (thoughtful music)
But, aha, you might be tempted to think
that this was buried somewhere in the back of the paper.
I thought that, (popping)
and I couldn't find them for the longest time,
because they're often on the front page!
At the top of "The Times," "The Evening Standard,"
"The Morning Post," that's how big it was.
Queen Victoria herself was
rumored to read them. (gasps)
And even the fictional Sherlock Holmes kept up
with agony columns like they were reality TV or something,
which they kind of were. (whimsical piano music)
I think it was so popular because it was this messy outburst
from an otherwise repressed society.
(dishes crashing)
There was love and longing on full display.
"Someday, the toast will come true
and I want you to come to me
with the perfect love that casteth out fear,
Thine only and always, Violets."
There was sadness and saltiness.
"What I told you is the truth.
Very miserable without you.
Write fully next time."
And then there were these intense personal dramas
that play out in a newspaper, remember.
"My deep love you know,
and what a fearful trial this separation has been to both,
and to greet only as friends,
instead of speaking all the heart's deep love
and devotion seems almost impossible."
Uh, are they gonna get back together?
- He'll be fine.
- [Narrator] But because this was Victorian England,
lovers still took measures to conceal their identities.
(dramatic music)
- It's a necessary distraction.
- [Narrator] Usually, that meant a short, cryptic message
like, whatever this one means. (popping)
It's not an address in London, we checked.
Or they used simple code names.
Some are cute. (creaking)
I saw messages to and from Icicle and Pug,
and one brave person in 1891
keeps sending love notes addressed to Witch.
But when even that level of security wasn't enough,
contributors to the agony column
sometimes switched into full code.
- Ciphers. (thoughtful music)
Coded messages that need to be deciphered.
- [Narrator] And a reminder, this isn't just part
of the movie, this is real.
Using basic, but fairly effective ciphers,
they encrypted their love letters.
So you come across these seeming strings
of nonsense in the paper.
I know it looks impossible at first glance,
but the way to crack these is often embedded
within the message itself.
Pause now if you wanna try it first.
Okay, there's a huge giveaway in this.
The word one is the key to the cipher.
It's telling the decryptor that each letter
has been shifted one letter up in the alphabet.
Although, strangely, (tapping)
Z is pulling double duty here as Y and A.
Why did they even bother encrypting them?
But even without a blatant key,
you can still solve many of these mysteries
by looking at both letter frequency and letter usage.
See, the English language uses certain letters
a lot more than others, like E is everywhere.
I mean, look at the word "everywhere."
So if you have a repeating letter in your code,
it's more likely to translate to an E, T, A, I, et cetera.
What's more, we use certain letters in identifiable ways.
One letter long words probably give you I or A.
If you see an apostrophe, there's more likely an S,
T or L lurking somewhere nearby.
And our language is full of the same two
and three letter words.
It, be, the. (whimsical music)
- Me, too.
- [Narrator] Yup, that's right.
So simple ciphers like the ancient Caesar cipher,
where letters are shifted,
or simple substitution cipher, (rattling)
where letters are scrambled,
can't completely hide the built-in patterns in our language.
They just swap out letters.
So, voila.
- I know Jiu-Jitsu. (mimics whooshing)
It's a martial art.
- [Narrator] And that breakability was unfortunate
for the lovesick coders who frequented the agony column,
because spectators really seemed
to relish breaking their codes
and publishing their messages for everyone to see.
Even professional cryptographers,
like Sir Charles Wheatstone, were known to drop
into a pair's conversation using their code
to tell them slow down. - Uh-uh, uh-uh-uh.
- [Narrator] It's like prudish Victorian England
just couldn't help themselves
around young lovers. (crowd exclaims)
But because this was Victorian reality TV,
others rooted for the writers.
I found a magazine that suggested lovers use
a far more sophisticated method,
called a poly alphabetic cipher,
which gets rid of the letter frequency problem.
Oh yeah, it really helps to have one of these to do it.
For each letter in your text you wanna cipher,
you use a predetermined keyword
to find a new shifted alphabet.
To get that with this example,
the key letter S is positioned next to the letter A
on the outer circle.
That's the new alphabet.
That means that the eye on the outer circle,
the plain text letter we want to encode,
matches up with the inner A, so A is the cipher letter.
I know this seems impossible,
but you can see why it'd be hard to break, right?
(mysterious music) (tapping)
And I've come across some love notes
that I can't crack, maybe you can.
This one could be a homophonic cipher,
meaning it piles on numerical substitutes for those letters
that have higher frequencies, better hiding them.
And fittingly enough, one of the inspirations
for Sherlock Holmes posted this head-scratcher,
although I don't think it's a love letter.
Sherlock Holmeses sure have come a long way.
But what about our detective?
Unsurprisingly, she surprised me.
What she creates for her mom is a transposition cipher,
a word scramble.
It's different from what we've been doing
because instead of substituting characters
and keeping the order...
you keep the characters and change the order.
- So I need to make it most devious.
- [Narrator] On its own it could be broken,
but you can combine it with other ciphers,
like the book cipher that Enola and her mom used.
But maybe the greatest thing
about the strange pastime of the agony column
is that you didn't have to be a detective
or a cipher to use it.
All you needed was a huge crush, a brain,
and enough money to pay the fee.
And you don't have to be a Victorian to enjoy it.
You can go read all these right now.
We'll give you some resources after the credits.
Until then, (babbles)!
Cheers. (whimsical music)
But the agony column is not the only way
that Enola Holmes mirrors real life Victorian England.
This is no joke.
Apparently, lady bicyclist detectives were so numerous,
they were advertised in the paper.
- My life is my own.
- [Narrator] With some help from history.
(jaunty music)