The family moved to Wychbold when his father became manager of the British Alkali Works at Stoke Prior, Worcestershire.

From 1840, he was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated BA (8th in the Classical tripos) in 1852.

[2] At King Edward's, under James Prince Lee, Benson "manifested a deeply religious tone of mind and was fond of sermons".

[4][7] According to the Notebooks of Henry James, his source for the novella The Turn of the Screw was the Archbishop of Canterbury (i.e. Benson) at Addington Palace on 10 January 1895.

Construction of Truro Cathedral began in 1880 to a design by the Gothic Revival architect John Loughborough Pearson.

Five years later Benson avoided Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln, being prosecuted before a lay tribunal under the Public Worship Regulation Act 1874 for six ritual offences by hearing the case in his own archiepiscopal court (inactive since 1699).

[11]: 365 In September of the same year, the papal bull Apostolicae curae, which denied the validity of Anglican orders, was published and Benson had started a reply.

[13] He was taken ill while attending Sunday service in St Deiniol's Church, Hawarden, Wales, on 11 October 1896, during a visit to the former Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone.

[18] Benson was the founder of the Church of England Purity Society,[19] an organisation which later merged with the White Cross Army.

[20] Benson told Henry James a simple, rather inexpert story he had heard about the ghosts of evil servants who tried to lure young children to their deaths.

[21] The hymn "God Is Working His Purpose Out" was written by Arthur C. Ainger as a tribute to Benson as both were Masters at Eton and Rugby respectively.

Another son was Arthur Christopher Benson, the author of the lyrics to Elgar's "Land of Hope and Glory" and master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Their sixth and youngest child, Robert Hugh Benson, became a priest in the Church of England before converting to Catholicism and writing many popular novels.

[27] Edward Benson's aunt, his father's maternal half-sister, was the botanical illustrator Mary Ann Jackson.