His brother William (1801–1881) was a barrister and Liberal MP who was ennobled as Lord Hatherley and became Lord Chancellor; his older brother John (1796–1866) was the father of Katharine O'Shea,[3] whose divorce from her husband and remarriage to Charles Stuart Parnell became a major political scandal in 1890.
At the selection meeting in the London Tavern on 18 July, one person favoured inviting the Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Ewart Gladstone, to be their candidate, but the others preferred Wood.
In an election address issued that evening he stated his selection was due "entirely to the favourable recollection of the services of my late father".
He said that he had been a reformer since his youth, when those principles were not dominant, and pledged himself to support any measures to extend the franchise, expand education, and to achieve an "equitable adjustment of the vexed question of church-rates".
[4] His Conservative opponent was the then Lord Mayor of London, William Cubitt, who had resigned as MP for Andover[6] in order to contest the by-election.