Named authorship is one of the central enabling unities of literary study. In the absence of an authorial name, we often inquire of the authorial motives behind anonymous publication as if such motives were knowable or relevant to the interpretation of the text or, indeed, to the history of anonymity or authorship.Taking as a case study the often-noted and analyzed anonymity of Evelina (1778), I demonstrate the difficulty and inutility of imputing motive to Frances Burney because such efforts focus on the singularity of both text and author while ignoring the broader trends in the literary and print marketplace.

In response to the growing prominence of quantification in the humanities, scholars of media and digital culture have highlighted the friction between the cultural and disciplinary roles of data and the epistemologies of humanistic inquiry. Johanna Drucker aptly characterizes the humanities as fields that emphasize "the situated, partial, and constitutive character of knowledge production," while data are often taken to be representations of "observer-independent reality."1 Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson likewise critique the dominant assumption of data's transparency: data, they insist, "are always already 'cooked' and never entirely 'raw.'"2 The choices involved in data collection and preparation are not objective; they are shaped by the always subjective, often tacit, and sometimes shared presuppositions of the domain-specialist researcher. Practitioners of computational approaches to literature have shown that analyzing large corpora of texts "at a distance" may reveal phenomena not readily accessible through close reading of individual texts.3 Yet, the notion of distance fosters an illusionWe are grateful to the many colleagues who have helped give this essay the shape it has taken: Karen Britland, Tom Broman, Josh Calhoun, and Lezlie Cross. We are particularly thankful to Professor Bret Hanlon of the Department of Statistics at University of Wisconsin-Madison for his assistance in testing the statistical significance of our findings. Finally, we are indebted to the hospitality of Maureen Bruno Roy and Matt Roy for opening their home during the period of archival work and data collection.

This essay begins with a general survey of current work in surveillance studies with a particular emphasis on the work in literary studies; it moves then to show the centrality of the 18th century to any account of surveillance or surveillance culture. It concludes with suggestions of how scholars of the literature of the long 18th century might contribute to the field surveillance studies and expand its historical and methodological scope.

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