CHILDS, ( :EORGE WILLIAM ( I829-941.. An American publisher and philanthropist. Ile was born in Baltimore. entered the navy in 1S42, and spent fifteen months in the service. Ile then became a clerk in a bookstore in Philadelphia, but established an independent business in 1817, and in 1849 became a partner in the publishing. house of Childs & Peterson. In 1864 he pur •hased the Philadelphia Public Li-dyer, one of the earliest cheap newspapers of the country, which under him attained a wide circulation and influence. His public gifts were munificent. in cludimr a memorial window in Westminster Abbey to Cowper and George Herbert: one in saint Westminster, to Milton; a reredos in Saint Thomas's. Winchester, com memorating Bishops Ken and Andrews: a monu ment at Kensal Green to Leigh Hunt; a memo rial fountain at Stratford-on-Avon: and in the United the presentation to the Typo graphical Society of Philadelphia of the print cemetery. 'Woodlands: in that city: the
erection of monuments over the graves of Edgar X. Poe and Richard A. Proctor; the erection of a stone cross on the site of the first Christian service on the California coast. at Point Reyes; and a subscription that made possible the erec tion and endowment of the Home for Union Printers at Colorado Springs. His benefactions to private persons also were large. Childless himself. he educated as ninny as eight hundred boys and girls. He constantly had a number of aged literary workers on his private pension list, and made many gifts and loans to struggling authors. Ile frequently bought up an entire edi tion of some book of an author whom he wished to aid. In 1885 he published Recollections of General Grant, and in 1890 a volume of Per sonal Recollections.