The writing of satire in Britain was transformed in a number of ways between the French Revolution and the Reform Act of 1832, and these changes belong to a complex history that cannot be reconstructed using only The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, a few Byron and Thomas Love Peacock works, and Shelley' fragmentary satire against satire. In other words, we can profit from learning to disrespect conventional notions of what is significant in English literature from the decades that have come to be called the Romantic period. As Marilyn Butler points out, “The so-called Romantics did not know at the time that they were supposed to do without satire, ” even though “future generations have become convinced that the Spirit of the Age was very different.” One approach might interpret as satires works by major writers that would not ordinarily be considered satiric, as Butler does with Hazlitt's Liber Amoris. A less ambitious method might analyze the texts of major authors that present themselves primarily as satires (Wordsworth's unfinished imitation of Juvenal's eighth satire, Shelley's Peter Bell the Third [1819] along with the fragment on satire, Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers [1809] and his later ottava rima poems, and so on), with a few such works by “second-rank” writers like Thomas Moore and Leigh Hunt thrown in to serve as context. Indeed, not only was satiric writing far more common and more central to literate culture than literary history has acknowledged, but also the handful of moderately well-known satires from this time are by no means typical of contemporary satires in either form or approach.