Working as a professional writer, Ritchie sent articles to the "Foreign Quarterly Review", the "Westminster Review", and other periodicals. The "London Weekly Review", on which he had been employed, passed into other hands, he and the former editor, James Augustus St. John, went to live in Normandy. Books made his reputation, and from this period he had enough work. In addition to his other engagements, he with William Kennedy, started a monthly periodical, "The Englishman's Magazine", which ran to seven numbers (April to October 1831), when his own illness caused its abandonment.