Is this a reference to young lovers of Victorian England communicating via encrypted messages via the personal columns in newspapers?

These “agony columns,” as they became known, provoked the curiosity of cryptanalysts, who would scan the notes and try to decipher their titillating contents. Charles Babbage is known to have indulged in this activity, along with his friends Sir Charles Wheatstone and Baron Lyon Playfair, who together were responsible for developing the deft Playfair cipher (described in Appendix E).

On one occasion, Wheatstone deciphered a note in The Times from an Oxford student, suggesting to his true love that they elope. A few days later, Wheatstone inserted his own message, encrypted in the same cipher, advising the couple against this rebellious and rash action. Shortly afterward there appeared a third message, this time unencrypted and from the lady in question: “Dear Charlie, Write no more. Our cipher is discovered.”

The Code Book, by Simon Singh