Keyword: Doubt

Using a draft essay by John Clare as its lodestar, this brief examination demonstrates how the decade’s rage for mapping, measurements and facts created a countervailing discourse of doubt. Literary writers self-consciously struggled to position themselves in relation to a culture in which novel forms of knowledge posited radical new certainties that seemed to undermine previously stable positions. This triggered in observers new forms of fear, wonder, bafflement and self-fashioning.