British intellectual culture witnessed a sharp reduction in the volume of epistemological debate between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This change coincided with a relocation of philosophical discourse from the treatise to the informal writing of the essayist. This study argues that these two phenomena are related. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea of intersubjectivity emerged as a counterdiscourse to scientific empiricism. Exemplified by Hume’s ‘easy’ philosophy, it sought to reground epistemological correspondence in social correspondence, in the circulation of trusting conversation. Contemporaneously, the rise of the essay, like the concern with trust, reveals the period’s preoccupation with the ways in which intellectual life was being shaped by economic change. The essay genre sought to effect a performative critique of instrumental reason which, while essentially nostalgic in its desire for unsystematic accomplishment, presented a pragmatic counterthrust to Enlightenment rationality. For David Hume and Samuel Johnson, the performance of virtue represents and enacts the social solidarity that either underpins norms or reflects moral truths. For later essayists, however, the fiction of familiarity was both more tenuous and more urgent. In the Romantic period, the essayist’s primary burden became one of establishing social and epistemological norms through the exercise of imaginative power. In the essays of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, the enactment of familiar conversation created an experience of singularity and enchantment that was linked to idealized and nostalgic forms of sociability. Thus, while the eighteenth-century essay consolidated ‘truth’, the Romantic essay produced it.