This book is a study of the arrival of electricity in the late-nineteenth-century domestic sphere, arguably one of the most abiding technical-cultural transformations of the modern era. The ‘domestication’ of electricity is represented here as a haphazard, accident-prone and controversial business; the assimilation of electricity into the home was marked by mystery, conflicting interests, a marked gendering of roles and iconographic culture. In this chapter I explain how this approach to the subject both extends established historical approaches and adds new perspectives and explanations to this transformation. In so doing I offer some alternatives to familiar assumptions in the historiography of what is commonly known as ‘electrification’.

It is easy to interpret historians of electrification as narrating the unfolding technologization which followed relatively straightforwardly from the development of patents for incandescent electric light in 1878 and the evolution of the dynamo generator in preceding decades. Furthermore it can sometimes seem that presumptive natural endpoint of electrification is the comprehensive utilization of electricity.