author
Samuel Manning
1822–1881
A Victorian Baptist minister and editor, he helped shape a popular series of richly illustrated travel books that brought distant places to home readers. His work blends religious conviction, curiosity about the wider world, and a gift for clear, lively prose.
2 Audiobooks
English Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil
by Samuel Manning, Samuel G. (Samuel Gosnell) Green
"Those Holy Fields." Palestine, Illustrated by Pen and Pencil
by Samuel Manning
About the author
Born in Leicester in 1822, he first worked in business before studying at the Baptist College in Bristol and then at the University of Glasgow. In 1846 he became minister at Sheppard's Barton in Frome, Somerset, where he served for about fifteen years and began contributing widely to religious and general literature.
He later moved into publishing, serving as editor of the Baptist Magazine and then as general book editor for the Religious Tract Society. In 1876 he was chosen as one of the society's secretaries. He is especially remembered for helping to create the Religious Tract Society's well-known illustrated travel books, including English Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil, American Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil, and other volumes on Europe and the Middle East.
He died in London on September 13, 1881. Though much of his writing grew out of nineteenth-century Protestant publishing, his books still offer a vivid sense of how Victorian readers were invited to see history, landscape, and travel through both instruction and wonder.