ABSTRACT
The MONTHLY REVIEW (1749–1845) was the most stable and most respectable of the reviews that had grown up in the eighteenth century. Ralph Griffiths, who had founded the Monthly in 1749, remained its editor until his death in 1803, when the editorship passed to his son George Edward Griffiths. The younger Griffiths, until he sold the journal in 1825, continued the same policies of integrity and even-handedness for which the Monthly had always been noted, but he failed to change with the times. By 1815 the Monthly Review seemed old-fashioned and stodgy beside the newer quarterly reviews like the Edinburgh and the Quarterly. By the 1820’s brash new journals like Blackwood’s and Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine were capturing the growing middle-class readership. The Monthly Review became passe as the influential reading public shifted from university-bred gentry to the emerging mercantile and professional classes. For further information on the Monthly Review, see Benjamin Christie Nangle’s two volumes, The Monthly Review: First Series, 1749–1789 (Oxford, 1934) and The Monthly Review: Second Series, 1790–1815 (Oxford, 1955).
