The Obfuscated Journals of Charles Wesley
January 14th 2009
I managed to chase down a copy of Prof Kenneth Newport’s paper, ‘Charles Wesley, ‘Warts and All’” which talks about the “encrypted” portions of Charles Wesley’s journal. This is part of my search for pre-computer examples of encrypted documents, which seem rare, as opposed to encrypted messages, which seem relatively common.
From a cryptographic and security standpoint, I’d say that Wesley’s journals were obfuscated and not encrypted. Wesley used a form of shorthand that, though personalized to some degree, was taught to students of Oxford and Cambridge. It is also reported that his own brother used the same sort of shorthand. Thus, Wesley’s diary entries may have been unreadable by most of the literate public, but readable by the relative handful of university graduates who had learned that writing method.