Author: Manners, George
Biography:
MANNERS, George (1778-1853: WBIS)
He was the son of Robert Manners of Kentish Town, London; the name of his mother is not known. He began the study of law at Lincoln's Inn in 1793 but was not called to the bar until 1812. In the interval he wrote a play, Edgar (1806), and founded a satirical magazine (The Satirist, or Monthly Meteor, 1807) which led to libel suits and a period of imprisonment. He practised law in London until 1819, at which point he was named British Consul for Massachusetts; he established the first British Consulate in Boston and stayed there until 1839, when he retired on a pension. He may have married in the early 1800s but there is no known reliable record of the marriage; at all events he had a son, Robert Charles Manners, whom he had installed as Vice-Consul in Boston by 1829. George Manners owned land in Canada and evidently took an interest in Canadian affairs: his 1825 poem was written to support survivors of fires there, and he was living in Cobourg at the time of his death. In 1855, after his death, his son lost a complicated lawsuit involving Manners's scheme to keep some of the profit from the sale of land that had been pledged to pay off his debts. (ODNB 4 Jan. 2020; Ontario Court of Chancery, "Goodeve v. Manners," Law Reports [1877]) HJ