Antonia Forster (2001), 'Review Journals and the Reading Public', in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays, London and New York: Leicester University Press, pp. 171-90.

Byron's joke about-Keats being killed by the Quarterly Review has deep roots. When Ralph Griffiths, after a few controversial years as a general bookseller, decided in 1749 that there was a niche in the expanding book trade for a publication offering general readers 'some idea of a book before they layout their money or time on it'; 1 he could hardly have imagined that his Monthly Review would last for nearly a century and begin a phenomenon that has been part of the literary world ever since. Within a few years the familiar process was well underway: booksellers were using quotations in advertisements, authors were attacking reviewing as corrupt and unfair, and the success of the Monthly Review was spawning imitators.