Substitution Cipher Puzzle

The phrase "Curiouser and Curiouser" is a memorable exclamation from Lewis Carroll's classic, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," first published in 1865. Alice utters these words as she experiences the perplexing sensation of her body rapidly expanding, signifying an increasingly strange or peculiar situation. Carroll, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, even coined the word "curiouser" for this whimsical expression.

Lewis Carroll was not only a gifted author but also a distinguished mathematician, poet, and photographer. He suffered from a lifelong stutter, which he referred to as his "hesitation," and partial deafness. Interestingly, the Dodo bird in Alice in Wonderland (Review) is believed to be a self-caricature, inspired by Carroll's own stuttered pronunciation of his last name, "Do-do-Dodgson." He even invented a device called a nyctograph to help him write down ideas in the dark.

The puzzle you solved employs a substitution cipher, a foundational method in the history of cryptography. In this type of cipher, each letter in the original message, known as the plaintext, is systematically replaced with a different letter or symbol to create the encrypted message, or ciphertext. This ancient technique dates back thousands of years, with one of the most famous early examples being the Caesar cipher, reportedly used by Julius Caesar himself. Arab scholars developed methods to break these ciphers around 850 AD, but substitution ciphers remained in use for centuries.