Sculptor born at Shoreditch, London, the son of the sculptor Charles Manning and his wife, Sarah (née Parsons). Charles Manning was in partnership with the sculptor John Bacon II (1777–1859) from 1808 until his death in 1812; by 1818, Samuel Manning had also gone into partnership with Bacon, at the latter’s premises, 17 Newman Street, London. The pair produced many church monuments, most of which are standard wall tablets. Rupert Gunnis dismissed them all as ‘dull and uninspired’, a judgement only slightly softened in Ingrid Roscoe’s successor dictionary where they are described as ‘largely prosaic’. Bacon was usually the designer and Manning the executant, as can be seen in the two sculptors’ mode of signing, a typical example being the monument to John Woollett (d.1819) at St Mary the Virgin, Rye, East Sussex, which is inscribed: J. BACON, INVT. … S. MANNING, FT. (i.e., Bacon designed it, Manning made it). Manning did from time to time carve his own designs, and also worked as a portrait sculptor, showing nine busts and statues at the annual Royal Academy exhibitions between 1806 to 1839. These include his model of a statue of John Wesley (1825). Commended by the painter Henry Howard RA as having gained ‘a central position amongst the sculpture exhibited that year’ (Illustrated London News, 30 June 1849), it attracted many visitors to Manning’s studio following the exhibition’s close, among them, Joseph Butterworth MP, who commissioned it in marble. A marble block was purchased but before Manning could start work, Butterworth died. So instead of producing a statue, Manning had what must have been the small recompense of being commissioned to design and execute a memorial tablet to Butterworth for Wesley’s Chapel, City Road, London. As for the marble purchased for the statue, Manning subsequently used it for a large wall monument to Charles Grant (d. 1823) which had been commissioned from him and Bacon for St George, Bloomsbury. (Gunnis implicitly excepted this from his negative assessment of the partnership’s output, describing it as their ‘best monument’, a view endorsed by Roscoe who drew attention to its ‘sensitive portrait of the dying man’.) There was subsequently an attempt to revive the Wesley commission and to have the statue erected in Westminster Abbey but the Dean refused it on account of its subject’s ‘factious character’. Only in 1849 was a place for the statue found, in the Theological Institute at Richmond. With Samuel Manning now dead, the translation from plaster to marble was undertaken by his son, Samuel Manning II (1815–1866). (Following the closure of the Institution in 1972, the statue was relocated to Methodist Central Hall, Westminster.) Manning died at Newman Street on 7 December 1842 in financially comfortable circumstances, leaving his household goods, furniture and books to his wife, £200 to each of his four daughters, and his statues, drawings, materials, tools and stock-in-trade to his son.
Bibliography: R. Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1851, London, [1968], p. 252; E. Hardy, ‘Manning, Samuel, the elder (1786–1842)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (online edn), (2004), 2008; Illustrated London News, 30 June 1849, p. 436; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 793–96; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 93–94; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. 381–83.
Terry Cavanagh, March 2025