Wirt Sikes

American journalist and writer (1836–1883), United States Consul at Cardiff from June 1876 until his death. He had worked on newspapers in Utica, Chicago and New York, written two novels, and — by one account — used as many as thirty pseudonyms, one of them for a dime novel. Four years in Wales produced British Goblins (1880), still the largest book on Welsh folklore in English, and Rambles and Studies in Old South Wales (1881). Richard Dorson called the first the most substantial book of Welsh legendry in English, and in the same assessment faulted it for leaning on earlier compilations rather than on collecting of its own.