George Wilkes

George Wilkes (1817 – September 23, 1885) was an American journalist and newspaper editor. A native of New York State, he became a journalist and after losing a libel case was imprisoned in New York City's jail; he wrote a pamphlet on the jail's conditions in 1844 based on his stay. The following year, Wilkes and a friend started publishing the National Police Gazette, a newspaper on 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, he published and edited the Spirit until his death in 1885. Wilkes also wrote a couple of books on non-sporting topics, and introduced pari-mutuel betting to the United States. Early life 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. His family was likely of Irish origin and he had a working class background. Little is known of his upbringing before he became a law clerk for Enoch E. Camp. 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. At the Subterranean, he came into contact with Mike Walsh, a politician and working class advocate who shared Wilkes' Democratic Party politics. The scholar Donna Dennis says of Wilkes at this time that he was "a clever writer, with a tempera- ment that was at once ambitious, adventurous, and entrepreneurial". In August 1841, Wilkes joined forces with William Snelling and founded the Sunday Flash, where he wrote and edited under a pseudonym, "Startle". Among other topics, the Sunday Flash rated New York's brothels and published descriptions and reviews of them. In 1841 and 1842, Wilkes was one of a group of writers and publishers who were prosecuted and convicted of "publishing an obscene paper", for their depictions of prostitution in their newspapers. Wilkes had also been charged with libel, and he pled guilty and printed an apology to the person he was accused of libeling, but he chose to fight the obscenity charge, and went to trial in January 1842. This trial ended with one juror holding out for acquittal, so the prosecutor retried him in April 1842. This time Wilkes, on the advice of his attorney, pled guilty in return for a suspended sentence and a promise to stop working for the sensationalist press.