Harrison, Benjamin (1808 -1887)

Benjamin Harrison was the son of Benjamin Harrison, Treasurer of Guy's Hospital. Educated at Christ Church, Oxford, he took his BA in 1830 and his MA in 1833 with distinctions in classics, theology, and Hebrew. While at Oxford he became involved in the early years of the Oxford Movement. In 1842 when he was made one of the Six Preachers at Canterbury Cathedral. In 1843 he was appointed domestic chaplain to William Howley, archbishop of Canterbury. Howley appointed him in 1845 to the post of Archdeacon of Maidstone and to a canonry at Canterbury Cathedral, posts which he retained until his death. In 1841 he married Isabella Thornton, daughter of the late Henry Thornton MP. Following his death in 1887, his widow donated his considerable library of some 16,000 books and pamphlets, to Canterbury Cathedral where it is housed in the old seventeenth-century library, renamed the Bibliotheca Howley-Harrisoniana (Howley-Harrison Library) after Harrison and his patron.