By-elections occupy an important place in modern British political history. Between the Great Reform Act and the end of the First World War, in excess of 2,600 such contests took place in Britain. They were an important and prominent feature of Victorian and Edwardian politics. And yet, despite their high visibility in the historical record, students of the period have paid scant attention to them. Little is know about these contests, a deficiency that this collection of essays seeks to remedy.

The seriousness with which contemporaries took by-elections alone is sufficient reason for historians to take them seriously, too. Not to do so would mean to neglect a key aspect of British political life and experience. The study of by-elections, moreover, can furnish the scholar with heuristic tools for the interpretation of important and sometimes controversial issues, many of which are staple features of historical debate.

However, if uncontested constituencies did not normally drop into the mouths of aspiring parliamentarians in the nineteenth century, so a study of by-election contests requires some careful preparation and much ‘pressing of the flesh’ of the historical record. Asserting the wider, though hitherto largely ignored, significance of by-elections for Victorian and Edwardian politics is one thing, to prove their significance quite another. It would have been tempting to opt for a broadly thematic approach that examined a number of selected aspects over a longer period of time.