In the 1820s and 1830s satire largely disappeared as a distinct literary form or distinct group of forms, and several factors bear responsibility: publishers needed the reliable profits fiction provided; many in the literary world assumed that satire, like poetry in general, was passe now that Byron was dead; and the public's desire to reevaluate their political and social institutions entailed a preference for “realistic” discursive forms like the treatise or the lecture over “imaginative” ones like satire. Moreover, another force was transforming satire, although indeed over a longer time span: the increasingly dominant ideologies characteristic of the middle classes, which in practical terms include those of the Nonconforming denominations and the Evangelical branch of Anglicanism, all restrained verbal attack and, along with it, satire.