In the foregoing pages I have explored the domestication of electricity in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, comparing this experience to that of the USA. I have shown that the two-pronged process of domestication involved considerable efforts from popularizers and entrepreneurs to accomplish. This labour was required both to show the public that electricity and its lighting technologies could be both effectively understood and tamed so that householders could electrify their homes without fear, aesthetic objections or undue uncertainty about the future consequences of electrification. It is clear, however, that such enterprises were only partly successful. The attempt to find a stable characterization for electricity was most problematic of all; wide-ranging debate on the identity and behaviour of electricity lasted into the second decade of the twentieth century coexisting with anthropomorphism of electricity as a congenial agent of domestic progress.

Those issues and debates disappeared from view eventually, however, as technocratic domestication brought a pragmatic solution: for those who allowed it into their home, daily consumption of electricity brought such a mundane familiarity to the mysterious agency that lingering concerns about its character and trustworthiness in the home fell away. Nevertheless there were some householders who lived out their days without adopting the new agency and its illuminating qualities, sticking loyally to gas and paraffin lamps instead until the day they died. For those sceptics who long continued to reject electricity and embrace gas for the purposes of cooking and heating, the structural domestication of electricity was never completed, and still is not complete in the fullest sense of the term.

This uncompleted domestication of electricity raised some significant and interrelated questions about authority and in turn about gender. Given the pronouncements of technically expert males that electricity was more safe, reliable and pleasant to have in the home than gas, we need to ask why their judgments were only partially accepted by some householders, while others hardly accepted them at all.