Decoding Edgar Allan Poe and his Cryptography

A life full of hardships

His life is a bleak mirror and offers a clear reflection of disturbing events from his childhood. Born and raised in poverty, with both of his birth parents dead, and a step father who never formally adopted Poe, he found solace in joining the military. He discovered later, that the military was not a place to where he belonged, and started working as an editor time and again, in various magazines and journals. However, he wasn’t able to stick in one place for long due to his severe drinking problem. It seemed like he had inherited it from his birth father.

His instability came with a heavy price, one where he lived in thorough poverty, never to see the light of his success that came after his death. So one would wonder about of why Poe would be known if most of his life went into searching for a better life, and failing at it, again and again.

The world of cryptography

The answer lies in cryptography. The Gold Bug, a short story by Poe, published in 1843, can certainly be looked at as the eye of his storm. Calm yet bold. This short story was the first piece in American literature to employ the cryptogram in a piece of fiction. In layman terms, cryptography is coding confidential information with secret symbols, generally with numbers, alphabets, and special characters. The cipher text, mentioned in the story is actually a code for finding buried treasure. And to everyone’s surprise, Poe was quite confident in understanding cryptography, better than anyone else.

This is the cryptogram that Poe created and added in his short story, ‘The Gold Bug.’ (Source: wikimedia commons)

Poe’s interest in cryptography has been documented from the early 1830s. During his time in Baltimore, he showed interest in ciphers published in local newspapers. In 1833, his short story “MS Found in a Bottle” won a contest in the “Baltimore Saturday Visitor,” and from this period, he began to incorporate themes of secret messages and hidden meanings into his works.

As an editor at Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia, his passion for cryptography became apparent and in 1839 he demonstrated his serious interest in cryptography, in an article that was titled ‘Secret Writing.’ From 1840 to 1841, he deciphered cryptograms sent by readers and also published an elaborate article on cryptanalysis. The series became immensely popular and cryptographic challenges were sent to him from across the country. His cryptographic sense inspired many writers, including Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, one which remains to be one of the foundational elements in the understanding of a secret space.

Decoding the bug

One observation that can be brought to light is that Poe had been a struggling writer throughout his life, even before he actually got into writing. Cryptography, became a sense of hope, a sense of sanity in his life full of uncanny events. In the short story, ‘The Gold Bug’, in the very moment that he finds the bug, indication to the representation of a skull is presented. Such eerie symbols and references continue in the story.

However, the cryptogram, is a seasoned message for directions, one that has all the keys to unlocking the hidden treasure chest. This remains a distant dream for Poe and seeing it come to life in the story brings some sort of innate satisfaction for Poe as an author, as a man devoted to excellence in his fields of interest and as a struggling individual who cannot seem to shake the idea of poverty for himself.

Further observation might also point to the fact that tragic events proportionate to the clarity and success of a rational and intellectual persona. Cryptograms fit somewhere perfectly in his sense of belongingness within the periphery of logical reasoning and linguistic creativity.

It is also noteworthy that Poe’s cryptography came with a sense of relief. A sense of distortion and an escape from the real world, a world where he had seen nothing but abandonment in its brutal form. Cryptography for him, became his solace but more importantly a deviation from the exposure of the real self to the outside world, and innate confidence in his abilities, yet a sacred space for decoding his identity.