The Westminster Review, a quarterly periodical, was established by James Mill and Jeremy Bentham in 1824 in opposition to the Whig supporting Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review that tended to support the Tories. It was conceived as the organ of the Philosophical Radicals and in its early days the he journal published work by Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle.

In 1830 the Westminster Review was taken over by Colonel Perronet Thompson, the former governor of Sierra Leone, who used the journal to campaign for parliamentary reform and the repeal of the Corn Laws. It is estimated that over the next five years Thompson spent £30,000 on the journal.

John Stuart Mill continued to write for the Westminster Review but in 1834 he founded a rival journal, the London Review. Two years later, Mill purchased the Westminster Review and merged the two journals. As proprietor, Mill used the journal to support those politicians such as Thomas Wakley, Joseph Brotherton, Thomas Duncombe and Thomas Attwood, who were advocating further reform of the House of Commons.

In 1851 John Chapman became the new owner and editor of the Westminster Review. Chapman favoured progressive intellectuals and some of the writers published in the journal included George Eliot, J. A. Froude, Walter Pater, T.H. Huxley and Mark Pattison. The Westminster Review ceased publication in 1914.