This book, like any good edited collection, impresses on two levels. In the first place, its various contributors address an important and unduly neglected topic—the place and nature of by-elections in the Victorian/Edwardian period—in consistently engaging and enlightening ways. Second, the essays hang together remarkably well. Because of this, the book achieves a nearly monographic completeness that is very rare among edited collections. These qualities are all the more impressive given the genuine paucity of scholarship on Victorian and Edwardian by-elections and consequently the lack of any orthodoxy to criticize and against which to organize.

Between the Great Reform Act and the end of the Great War, over 2,600 by-elections were held in British constituencies. Between 1852 and 1857 alone, fully one-third of all seats were subject to by-elections. The Victorian and Edwardian newspaper press devoted a very considerable amount of attention to the unfolding of by-election contests; contemporaries were both fascinated by these events and convinced of their utterly central importance to both politics and political culture. By-elections were, as Otte and Readman claim in the book's introduction, “prominent, indeed permanent, feature[s] of political life, and they provided a central forum for public debate and partisanship” (2). And yet, despite the enormous attention that historians of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain have lavished on matters of electoral politics in this period of intense and rapid political modernization, remarkably little effort has been made to understand the place and role of by-elections. By-Elections in British Politics redresses this neglect and, in doing so, sheds new light on many features of the Victorian and Edwardian political landscape.

There are two kinds of essay in this book. In the first place, there are essays that use by-elections as a lens through which to reexamine particular political debates and issues. T. G. Otte and Geoffrey Hicks, for instance, each consider the extent to which debates over foreign policy, and the complicated relationship that existed between foreign and domestic policy, influenced by-election outcomes. Anthony Taylor's chapter gives an excellent account of the continuing relevance of radical electoral “independence” during the “liberal meridian” of the 1870s and 1880s; Matthew Roberts argues that by-elections helped unionists flesh out and develop dynamic strategies for unionism. Ian Packer considers the influence of by-elections in shaping party policies on land reform between 1885 and 1914, ultimately arguing that whereas such elections made minimal impact on party ideology, they nonetheless played a crucial role in educating politicians on which policy initiatives were profitable and which were not. Phillips Payson O'Brien, meanwhile, focuses his chapter tightly on the 1909 Bermondsey by-election, which he describes as a watershed moment for the emergence of new political creeds.

The second kind of essay treats the subject of by-elections broadly over an extended period. Philip Salmon's opening chapter is a very compelling quantitative analysis of voting at by-elections between the first reformed elections and the fall of Palmerston's second government. In addition to showing that rates of contestation and voter turnout at by-elections were comparable to those of general elections, the chapter argues that early and mid-Victorian by-elections acted as “instruments of politicisation . . . assisting the emergence of nationally oriented voter partisanship” (42). By forcing voters to “plump,” early and mid-Victorian by-elections trained the electorate to behave in a consistently partisan fashion. Moreover, as Angus Hawkins's chapter demonstrates, this emerging culture of electoral partisanship posed new challenges to those seeking reelection as government appointees. Government appointment reelections accounted for 27 percent of all by-elections between 1832 and 1886, and Hawkins argues that, although the majority of these were uncontested, such events enabled a significant measure of popular and local influence over the composition of ministries—especially Whig and liberal ministries. Kathryn Rix's excellent chapter complements Hawkins's analysis for the period stretching up to the Great War. Rix argues that whereas the application of sophisticated “modern” party machinery—and particularly the use of professional electoral agents—revolutionized by-election campaigning from the late-1860s, localities strongly, and often very effectively, resisted outside interference and agenda setting at by-elections. And yet, as Paul Readman and Luke Blaxill's chapter makes clear, Edwardian by-elections were fought, not over local matters, but rather on “the issues dominating national political discourse” (228). The centrality of national issues at by-elections helps to explain why, as Readman and Blaxill argue, the Edwardians valued these events as very accurate tools with which to assess, and indeed predict, the relative strengths of the parties and the state of public opinion. Gordon Pentland's chapter both supports and complicates this reading of the importance of national issues by demonstrating that Scottish by-elections addressed uniquely Scottish issues.

By-Elections in British Politics is a stimulating and rewarding book. While it does not revolutionize our understanding of Victorian and Edwardian political culture, it nonetheless enriches our appreciation of electoral politics and points the way for further research on a neglected, but important, topic. One hopes that political historians will continue to take by-elections seriously.