Self-erasure and practices of motivated forgetting in nineteenth-century Britain
Far from being unique to the digital present, a preoccupation with personal data protection was already discernible in the nineteenth century. This project brings into focus historical fears about an overbearing recording system by examining the emergence of self-erasure long before GDPR. Increasingly concerned with questions of legacy and what they would be leaving behind, public figures in this earlier period began actively destroying those personal traces they wished to shield from future attention. While a vast body of research has studied the making and reproduction of modern memory, this shift to consider forgetting enables a new account of memory’s deliberate unmaking.
The project deploys materialist and sociological frameworks to ask how, why, and with what effects these practices of motivated forgetting emerged. Comprised of three case studies centred upon nineteenth-century London, it investigates the systematic destruction of personal memory engaged in by a series of celebrities over the course of this period. It will contribute significant new knowledge to several research fields—memory studies, the history of canonization, celebrity studies and media history—while casting a longer perspective upon the EU’s recently legislated ”right to be forgotten”. Examining how past individuals worked to shape their prospective erasure, its results promise a pertinent means of rethinking contemporary dilemmas about the control and future of digital memory.
Final report
Project aims and development
In today’s increasingly automated digital memory regime, demands for forgetting have become commonplace. As the tech giants harvest and store everything we do online, the debate on the “right to be forgotten” has come to seem self-evident. Less acknowledged, though, is that the concern with personal data protection has a longer and more complex history beyond our digital present. This project set out to recover episodes from that history – specifically, to investigate how and why practices of “self-erasure” became more widespread among nineteenth-century authors.
What did these authors do to protect their legacies from the prying attention of future readers? What sort of erasure did they employ to shape their posthumous reputation within the public sphere of print culture? How did changing conditions in the period’s memory and celebrity culture encourage more public figures to manage the personal traces they were prepared to leave behind? And what can we learn today from these attempts to exercise control over the afterlife of personal data?
The project has pursued a two-pronged strategy for addressing these questions: one methodological, the other empirical. The first strand – in part a result of the pandemic, which made the planned archival studies abroad impossible for much of the project period – focused on laying the groundwork for exploring erasure as an object of study. What kind of phenomenon is this, and how might we approach it as a field of research? To begin sketching out what we called “erasure studies,” I collaborated with the intellectual and media historian Johan Fredrikzon, who has examined the role of erasure in the early history of digitisation and who at the time was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
The second strand examined these questions through empirical examples from nineteenth-century Britain, with a particular focus on the author Frances Burney (1752-1840). She sought to edit and erase parts of her extensive personal archive before it reached posterity. Burney is a revealing case because she reflected on her own acts of erasure, while scholars have in some cases been able to reconstruct what she tried to remove. Such moments offer a rare glimpse into practices that are otherwise difficult to trace – for self-erasure, by its very nature, remains an elusive phenomenon. (Done well, it tends to disappear.)
Results
The principal result of the project’s first and broader strand was to provide a conceptual and methodological basis for the systematic study of erasure – as both a historical and a contemporary phenomenon. This framework enables researchers from a range of disciplines to engage with questions concerning how not only objects such as files, letters, and photographs, but also identities, data, buildings, and memories come to disappear from the world.
While previous research within Memory Studies has tended to view erasure primarily as a negative, state-centred process – the top-down acts of destruction described by Paul Connerton as “repressive erasure” – our aim was to open a broader horizon of possibility. Drawing on Connerton’s typology of seven forms of forgetting as a source of inspiration, we proposed the following types of erasure for researchers to consider: “repressive erasure”, “protective erasure”, “operational erasure”, “amending erasure”, and “calamitous or neglectful erasure”. The point was to suggest that erasure can operate according to many different logics and practices – and is not limited to, nor defined by, say, authoritarian oppression in the state archives.
The project’s second key result lay in applying this framework to the empirical case of Frances Burney. More specifically, I interpreted Burney’s extensive self-archiving and destruction as an instance of “protective erasure”. Rather than understanding her practices as a form of oppression imposed from without, this meant approaching her self-erasure as a kind of agency: Burney’s erasures were proactive, self-willed and pre-emptive – a means of exerting control over her posthumous reputation and the future archive. One effect of this approach was to position her as part of an early-nineteenth-century resistance to what was perceived as the encroaching demands of an invasive celebrity culture and a more pervasive recording system. This contextualization also shifted attention beyond the primarily literary focus that has characterised much Burney scholarship, situating her efforts to shape her legacy within a broader logic of biographical resistance through protective erasure.
A third principal result, also grounded in the Burney case, concerns the relationship between gender and erasure. The literary scholar Andrew Bennett has argued that the Romantic period’s growing preoccupation with posterity was primarily a masculine phenomenon – female authors, in his interpretation, were instead associated with a more passive form of self-effacement. Such a gendered disavowal of posterity positioned female self-erasure as a sign of timidity and an unwillingness to claim space in the commemorative sphere, echoing the difficulties women writers faced in pursuing a public profile during their lifetimes. According to this view, male authors actively pursued posthumous recognition, while their female counterparts modestly expected oblivion.
Yet the example of Burney suggests something different. It shows, in part, a female author every bit as preoccupied with posterity as the likes of Wordsworth or Hazlitt. More importantly, it reveals the kind of erasure that such a concern with future renown could necessitate. In the context of increasing public curiosity about celebrities’ personal lives, she turned erasure into a tool for reputation management. Far from being a sign of gendered weakness, the strategic character of Burney’s protective erasure amounted to an assertion of archival power. This re-configuration of the dynamics between gender, erasure and the archive points towards a productive line of further inquiry: to what extent might the complex and contested negotiations of female authors in the public sphere have made them particularly attuned to the possibilities – and enabling potential – of self-erasure? How did the relationship between gender and self-erasure shift and develop during the period when such practices became increasingly common?
Dissemination and Collaboration
The project’s main scholarly output is an article on erasure as an object of study, published in the recently established Cambridge University Press journal “Memory, Mind & Media”. This was a particularly apt venue since – beyond being Open Access – the journal was launched in order to foster interdisciplinary exchange within the field of Memory Studies, especially across the human sciences and the humanities/social sciences. In short, it enabled us to reach a broader constellation of scholars whose work potentially intersects with erasure than would have been possible within the publication forums of a particular discipline. The article has attracted considerable interest, becoming one of the journal’s most downloaded publications during its first two years.
The project’s second scholarly output is an article entitled “Frances Burney and Protective Self-Erasure in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain”, which has been submitted to the journal “Nineteenth-Century Contexts” and is currently under review. The journal was chosen partly for its interdisciplinary scope beyond literary studies, and partly for its particular interest in histories that engage with contemporary relevance. The article develops the contextualization of Burney’s erasure outlined above, situating her personal archiving project in relation to both the publicity demands of celebrity culture and an emergent archival consciousness, to highlight its subversive potential.
The final output is a booklet on the project for RJ’s Yearbook, which is due to be published in Swedish and English next year (i.e. 2026). Provisionally titled “Bureaucracy and the Desire for Forgetting”, this essay aims to make the project’s results accessible for a wider audience – particularly by highlighting the broader questions of principle it raises about the politics of forgetting in an age of Big Data. Drawing on a range of historical examples – from Kafka to Dickens – and moving towards our present moment of surveillance capitalism, it argues that protective erasure has a long and diverse history from which we can still learn.
Beyond sustained collaboration with Johan Fredrikzon in developing ideas around erasure studies, the project’s results have been presented and discussed in a range of contexts – nationally, internationally, and across both academic and public settings. The methodological article was further developed through a workshop with the interdisciplinary network “Heritage Transformations” at Uppsala University and through History of Ideas seminars at Stockholm and Uppsala universities. The empirical case of Burney was presented at the joint conference of “The British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism”, while the notion of protective erasure and the longer history of data protection were discussed at the annual Memory Studies conference in Newcastle, UK. A public lecture on self-erasure and its relation to heritage institutions was also held at the National Library of Sweden (KB), as part of the outreach series “Berättelser från KB”.
In today’s increasingly automated digital memory regime, demands for forgetting have become commonplace. As the tech giants harvest and store everything we do online, the debate on the “right to be forgotten” has come to seem self-evident. Less acknowledged, though, is that the concern with personal data protection has a longer and more complex history beyond our digital present. This project set out to recover episodes from that history – specifically, to investigate how and why practices of “self-erasure” became more widespread among nineteenth-century authors.
What did these authors do to protect their legacies from the prying attention of future readers? What sort of erasure did they employ to shape their posthumous reputation within the public sphere of print culture? How did changing conditions in the period’s memory and celebrity culture encourage more public figures to manage the personal traces they were prepared to leave behind? And what can we learn today from these attempts to exercise control over the afterlife of personal data?
The project has pursued a two-pronged strategy for addressing these questions: one methodological, the other empirical. The first strand – in part a result of the pandemic, which made the planned archival studies abroad impossible for much of the project period – focused on laying the groundwork for exploring erasure as an object of study. What kind of phenomenon is this, and how might we approach it as a field of research? To begin sketching out what we called “erasure studies,” I collaborated with the intellectual and media historian Johan Fredrikzon, who has examined the role of erasure in the early history of digitisation and who at the time was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
The second strand examined these questions through empirical examples from nineteenth-century Britain, with a particular focus on the author Frances Burney (1752-1840). She sought to edit and erase parts of her extensive personal archive before it reached posterity. Burney is a revealing case because she reflected on her own acts of erasure, while scholars have in some cases been able to reconstruct what she tried to remove. Such moments offer a rare glimpse into practices that are otherwise difficult to trace – for self-erasure, by its very nature, remains an elusive phenomenon. (Done well, it tends to disappear.)
Results
The principal result of the project’s first and broader strand was to provide a conceptual and methodological basis for the systematic study of erasure – as both a historical and a contemporary phenomenon. This framework enables researchers from a range of disciplines to engage with questions concerning how not only objects such as files, letters, and photographs, but also identities, data, buildings, and memories come to disappear from the world.
While previous research within Memory Studies has tended to view erasure primarily as a negative, state-centred process – the top-down acts of destruction described by Paul Connerton as “repressive erasure” – our aim was to open a broader horizon of possibility. Drawing on Connerton’s typology of seven forms of forgetting as a source of inspiration, we proposed the following types of erasure for researchers to consider: “repressive erasure”, “protective erasure”, “operational erasure”, “amending erasure”, and “calamitous or neglectful erasure”. The point was to suggest that erasure can operate according to many different logics and practices – and is not limited to, nor defined by, say, authoritarian oppression in the state archives.
The project’s second key result lay in applying this framework to the empirical case of Frances Burney. More specifically, I interpreted Burney’s extensive self-archiving and destruction as an instance of “protective erasure”. Rather than understanding her practices as a form of oppression imposed from without, this meant approaching her self-erasure as a kind of agency: Burney’s erasures were proactive, self-willed and pre-emptive – a means of exerting control over her posthumous reputation and the future archive. One effect of this approach was to position her as part of an early-nineteenth-century resistance to what was perceived as the encroaching demands of an invasive celebrity culture and a more pervasive recording system. This contextualization also shifted attention beyond the primarily literary focus that has characterised much Burney scholarship, situating her efforts to shape her legacy within a broader logic of biographical resistance through protective erasure.
A third principal result, also grounded in the Burney case, concerns the relationship between gender and erasure. The literary scholar Andrew Bennett has argued that the Romantic period’s growing preoccupation with posterity was primarily a masculine phenomenon – female authors, in his interpretation, were instead associated with a more passive form of self-effacement. Such a gendered disavowal of posterity positioned female self-erasure as a sign of timidity and an unwillingness to claim space in the commemorative sphere, echoing the difficulties women writers faced in pursuing a public profile during their lifetimes. According to this view, male authors actively pursued posthumous recognition, while their female counterparts modestly expected oblivion.
Yet the example of Burney suggests something different. It shows, in part, a female author every bit as preoccupied with posterity as the likes of Wordsworth or Hazlitt. More importantly, it reveals the kind of erasure that such a concern with future renown could necessitate. In the context of increasing public curiosity about celebrities’ personal lives, she turned erasure into a tool for reputation management. Far from being a sign of gendered weakness, the strategic character of Burney’s protective erasure amounted to an assertion of archival power. This re-configuration of the dynamics between gender, erasure and the archive points towards a productive line of further inquiry: to what extent might the complex and contested negotiations of female authors in the public sphere have made them particularly attuned to the possibilities – and enabling potential – of self-erasure? How did the relationship between gender and self-erasure shift and develop during the period when such practices became increasingly common?
Dissemination and Collaboration
The project’s main scholarly output is an article on erasure as an object of study, published in the recently established Cambridge University Press journal “Memory, Mind & Media”. This was a particularly apt venue since – beyond being Open Access – the journal was launched in order to foster interdisciplinary exchange within the field of Memory Studies, especially across the human sciences and the humanities/social sciences. In short, it enabled us to reach a broader constellation of scholars whose work potentially intersects with erasure than would have been possible within the publication forums of a particular discipline. The article has attracted considerable interest, becoming one of the journal’s most downloaded publications during its first two years.
The project’s second scholarly output is an article entitled “Frances Burney and Protective Self-Erasure in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain”, which has been submitted to the journal “Nineteenth-Century Contexts” and is currently under review. The journal was chosen partly for its interdisciplinary scope beyond literary studies, and partly for its particular interest in histories that engage with contemporary relevance. The article develops the contextualization of Burney’s erasure outlined above, situating her personal archiving project in relation to both the publicity demands of celebrity culture and an emergent archival consciousness, to highlight its subversive potential.
The final output is a booklet on the project for RJ’s Yearbook, which is due to be published in Swedish and English next year (i.e. 2026). Provisionally titled “Bureaucracy and the Desire for Forgetting”, this essay aims to make the project’s results accessible for a wider audience – particularly by highlighting the broader questions of principle it raises about the politics of forgetting in an age of Big Data. Drawing on a range of historical examples – from Kafka to Dickens – and moving towards our present moment of surveillance capitalism, it argues that protective erasure has a long and diverse history from which we can still learn.
Beyond sustained collaboration with Johan Fredrikzon in developing ideas around erasure studies, the project’s results have been presented and discussed in a range of contexts – nationally, internationally, and across both academic and public settings. The methodological article was further developed through a workshop with the interdisciplinary network “Heritage Transformations” at Uppsala University and through History of Ideas seminars at Stockholm and Uppsala universities. The empirical case of Burney was presented at the joint conference of “The British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism”, while the notion of protective erasure and the longer history of data protection were discussed at the annual Memory Studies conference in Newcastle, UK. A public lecture on self-erasure and its relation to heritage institutions was also held at the National Library of Sweden (KB), as part of the outreach series “Berättelser från KB”.