George Wilkes

George Wilkes
Born	George Wilkes 1817 New York
Died	September 23, 1885
Occupation	Journalist and editor
Children	Alicia, George

George Wilkes (1817 – September 23, 1885) was an American journalist and newspaper editor. A native of New York, Wilkes became a journalist and after losing a libel case was imprisoned in New York City's jail; his imprisonment led him to write a pamphlet on the jail's conditions in 1844. The next year, Wilkes and a friend started publishing National Police Gazette, a newspaper dealing with crime reporting and other sensationalistic topics. In 1856 Wilkes bought a sporting newspaper called The Spirit of the Times, which he had previously worked for. After selling the Gazette, Wilkes continued to publish and edit the Spirit until his death in 1885. Wilkes also wrote a couple of books on non-sporting topics as well as introducing parimutuel betting into the United States.

Wilkes was born in 1817 in the state of New York in the United States. It is not sure who his parents were, although they may have been George Wilkes, a cabinet maker, and Helen. Little is known of his upbringing before he became a law clerk for Enoch E. Camp. But Wilkes left the legal profession for journalism, first working for a series of short-lived newspapers in New York City, the Flash, the Whip, and the Subterranean. He wrote and edited the Sunday Flash under a pseudonym, "Startle". Among other topics, the Sunday Flash rated New York's brothels and published descriptions and reviews of them. He lost a libel case and was sentenced to a term in the city jail, The Tombs. After serving a month in jail, Wilkes wrote a pamphlet entitled The Mysteries of the Tombs: A Journal of Thirty Days Imprisonment in the N. Y. City Prison, which came out in 1844 and was based on his experiences in jail. Wilkes studied law after his stint in jail, and even called himself an attorney for a short time.

In 1845 Wilkes joined forces with Camp and began the National Police Gazette. The Gazette quickly became popular and within a few weeks of its founding had a circulation of 15,000.Collier's Magazine once called the Gazette a most interesting record of "horrid murders, outrageous robberies, bold forgeries, astounding burglaries, hideous rapes, vulgar seductions, and recent exploits of pickpockets and hotel thieves." Because of Wilkes' and Camp's efforts to combat crime in New York through the Gazette, the offices of the newspaper were the subject of attacks by mobs stirred up by criminals.

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