Doubt, a matter of mixed feelings, self-consciousness and speculative enquiries, was a state that many in the decade found themselves in. I will begin this discussion of doubt in the 1820s with a quotation that is itself doubtful in content and form:

The writer recounts and attempts to keep up with the 1820s catchphrase, the ‘march of intelect’ (p. 24): change, progress, improvement. Yet the march leaves the intellect spinning, unsure which way is forward. The prose gets lost, deranged. The Act for Ascertaining and Establishing Uniformity of Weights and Measures was written into law on 17 June 1824, and that should help: quantities fixed, comparisons possible, subjective experience of space and time regulated. Yet ‘the units & common place materials of things hardly know me in my astonishments’ (p. 27). That is not ‘I do not know them’, but those measurements have started to doubt me. ‘Where am I’, the writer asks, though he is also asking ‘when am I’ and ‘who am I’. The reader may simply be asking ‘what is this?’.

The quotation comes from an unsigned essay by John Clare, written (probably) in 1829, though it remained unpublished until 2001. It is a product of the 1820s, and the difficulty we have in assigning it a date or even a form is an aspect of its relations with the decade's creative innovations and uncertainties. It is a characteristic production of the 1820s in the doubts it raises rather than the answers it provides. The complaint one might make about writing like this is that, in its frantic chasing of an era of constant ‘improvments’, it loses shape. It is, one might say, deservedly ephemeral because it doubts its status so thoroughly. It has often seemed to be true of the decade as a whole: it does not shape itself in a way that is easily graspable, in part because it seemed so relentlessly focused on forward momentum and self-consciously concerned with its own future status. Its energy disperses and it leaves little trace. This keyword takes Clare's doubtful method of writing as its model.