George William Childs (May 12, 1829 – February 3, 1894) was an American publisher who co-owned the Public Ledger newspaper in Philadelphia with financier Anthony Joseph Drexel.

[1] He was raised by a likewise unidentified aunt in comfortable circumstances, a fact he later concealed to make his rise from obscurity seem more remarkable.

When Childs turned 18, he took his savings, which amounted to several hundred dollars, and leased space in the offices of the Philadelphia Public Ledger and started his own firm.

Childs was married to Emma B. Peterson, the granddaughter of Judge John Bouvier, a jurist born in Codognan, France.

Her father was Robert Evans Peterson, a lawyer, and scientist; her mother was Hannah Mary Bouvier, author of Familiar Astronomy and collaborator with her husband on other works.

The business was squeezed by rising paper and printing costs due to wartime shortages as the country engaged in the Civil War.

The paper had lost circulation by supporting the Copperhead Policy of opposing the American Civil War and advocating an immediate peace settlement with the Confederate States.

He changed the editorial policy to the Loyalist (Union) line, raised advertising rates, and he doubled the cover price to two cents.

[7] Circulation growth led the firm to outgrow its facilities, and in 1866 Childs bought property at Sixth and Chestnut Streets in Philadelphia and constructed the Public Ledger Building, which was called at the time "the finest newspaper office in the country.

The suburban village known as Wayne, on the Pennsylvania Railroad, fourteen miles from Philadelphia, differs so much from the ordinary town allowed to grow up hap-hazard and to develop conveniences as population increases, that it is necessary, in describing it as it appears, to keep in mind some facts about its history.

Childs was also a very close friend of President Ulysses S. Grant, and they owned adjacent summer homes in Long Branch, New Jersey.

When the dying Grant was struggling to complete his war memoirs to support his family after his death, he asked Childs to decide which firm should publish the work.

[15] In addition to numerous private benefactions in educational and charitable fields, he erected memorial windows to William Cowper and George Herbert in Westminster Abbey (1877), and to John Milton in St. Margaret's, Westminster (1888), a monument to Leigh Hunt at Kensal Green, a William Shakespeare memorial fountain at Stratford-on-Avon (1887), and a monument to Richard A.

[20][21] Upon his death his employees at the Public Ledger adopted the following resolution: The employees of the Public Ledger, having lost by the death of George W. Childs one who has stood to them in the relation of a kind and considerate father, find it impossible to express in formal resolutions the due sense of their great loss, but nevertheless seek to record in this minute their high appreciation of his character as it has been revealed to them in daily intercourse.

He was the embodiment of kindness and benevolence; his broad sympathies made him a citizen of the world, and not merely those associated with him socially and in business, but humanity itself, lost a generous friend and noble exemplar by his death.