Samuel Charles Wilks

Samuel Charles Wilks (1789–1872) was an evangelical clergyman of the Church of England, known as a journalist.

Life He was son of Samuel Charles Wilks (1762–1819) of Newington, Surrey, a clerk at the East India Company, and Elizabeth Barber (1762–1830), daughter of Stephen Barber of Walsall, Staffordshire. Wilks's paternal grandfather, Samuel Wilks (1729–1803), was Examiner of India Correspondence at the East India Company between 1769 and 1785, the first to occupy that role.

Wilks was educated for the church. He matriculated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, on 8 June 1810, aged 21, and graduated B.A. in 1814 and M.A. in 1816.

Wilks took holy orders, being ordained deacon in 1813, and priest in 1814, by Richard Beadon. He was curate at Norton Malreward, Chew Stoke and Exeter St Martin. He attached himself to the Clapham sect, and in 1816 succeeded Zachary Macaulay as editor of the Christian Observer, the organ of the sect. Charles Simeon was a friend. Their children included the surgeon Alfred Garratt Platt Wilks. Their eldest son, Rev. Theodore Chambers Wilks (1828–1876), married in 1863 Agnes Maria Baker, daughter of Sir Henry Loraine Baker, 2nd Baronet. Agnes was the great-granddaughter of Mary Hayley (née Wilkes) and great-grandniece of the politician John Wilkes. While the Wilks family was very distantly related to the more famous Wilkeses – both had ancestral roots in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire – Theodore and Agnes's marriage was probably coincidental. Rev. Samuel Charles even sought to distance his surname from that of the radical John Wilkes by claiming that his grandfather, Samuel Wilks the Examiner of India Correspondence, had deliberately dropped the "e" from the surname "to prevent his being mistaken for Wilkes the republican". In reality, the surname was already spelt "Wilks" in the Bloxwich parish register.

Rev. Samuel Charles Wilks's nephew, through his younger brother Joseph Barber Wilks (1790–1854), was Sir Samuel Wilks, 1st Baronet.