Late Victorians were accustomed to seeing technical novelties not just as entertaining theatrical diversions but as laden with both promises of material luxury and threats of bodily harm. Those who read daily press reports of railway crashes, gas conflagrations and steam boiler explosions in the early 1880s were hardly surprised to discover that the electricity provided not only a novel kind of illumination but also a new and unpleasant form of accidental death. The case of electricity posed unusually complex concerns, however, and this was not just because it had been employed for decades in medical treatments of contested therapeutic efficacy, nor because it was employed from 1890 as a statutory if still controversial means of execution in New York State. There was something new and rather disturbing about letting the strange and powerful agency of electricity loose around the home: a hallowed space in which industrially-sourced gaslight had still not displaced the paraffin lamp or candle by the early 1880s, and the telephone was almost a complete stranger.

Behind the recurrent lay question ‘what is electricity?’ was householders’ demand to know the nature of the potent commodity that they were invited to risk bringing into the safety of the domestic sphere, notwithstanding evidence of its potentially fatal effects on unwary mortals.