Aspland edited the magazine until the end of 1826, when the paper was bought by the recently formed British and Foreign Unitarian Association.
The "Cookites", the Methodist Unitarian movement founded by Joseph Cooke, was launched by an article in the Monthly Repository for May 1815.
[3] A second series of the magazine, now the Monthly Repository and Review of General Literature, was begun in January 1827: the Unitarian Association's Book Department, under Thomas Rees, took direct editorial control until William Johnson Fox was appointed editor in 1828.
In 1831 Fox cut the magazine's explicit ties with Unitarianism by buying the paper, which had been making a loss, from the Association.
He continued as editor-proprietor until 1836, when the magazine was briefly owned and edited by first Richard Henry Horne (1836–7) and then Leigh Hunt (1837–8).