If you want to understand why journalists are so much more successful than historians of science and technology at writing books that intelligent people want to read, just take a glance at this book. Graeme Gooday has a wonderfully interesting – and significant – story to tell, but I dearly wish that he had taken the trouble to tell it, and that the publisher had had the sense to illustrate it, better than either of them have.

The central question, encapsulated in the main title, is how it came to pass that British householders were willing to allow something as mysterious and dangerous as electricity into their homes. Previous answers to this question, as Gooday rightly points out, have simply repeated the marketing messages of the early electric companies: electric lighting was safer, cleaner and ‘more modern’ than manufactured gas – and so, of course, its triumph was inevitable. Gooday argues that historians who accept this notion have fallen into the trap of technological determinism: assuming that some technologies succeed because they are inherently or naturally better than others. Following the dictates of social construction, the theoretical foundation of much recent scholarship in the history of technology, Gooday insists that electricity's success was due mostly to human, not technological, agency.

The word ‘domesticating’ in his title has two, related meanings, both crucial, he argues, to the eventual success of electricity: first was to tame the image of electricity and second was to encourage its use in the home. His book is devoted both to identifying the individuals and organizations that were agents of diffusion and to describing the various advocacy techniques that were employed.

Gooday argues that the experts, the physicists who had struggled to understand the nature of electric current, were less than useful as domesticators. This was partly because they could not agree on what electricity actually was and partly because they could not even express their lack of consensus in language that laypeople could understand – not when they testified in court about deaths caused by electric current, not when they were trying to attract investors in rival AC- or DC-based enterprises, not even when they attempted the Huxleyian task of scientific popularization. Innovators of the kind capable of convincing householders that lightning could be safely brought into their homes were not, Gooday argues, the folks who had performed the crucial experiments and survived to tell the tale.

The cast of Gooday's successful domesticators is more than a little surprising: ranging from, but not limited to, the conservative statesman Lord Salisbury, the owners of early electric supply companies, the genteel wives of several electrical engineers and the aristocratic ladies who wore electric jewellery and headdresses to fancy balls. Salisbury was an amateur scientist and an early enthusiast for electricity; he insisted on electrifying his magnificent residence outside London, Hatfield House, despite the objections of his wife and daughters (they ‘complained bitterly about the glare and noise’ of electric lamps) and the death of one of his gardeners (who made the mistake of touching the unbound end of a live wire). According to Gooday, Salisbury was an influential domesticator of electricity in part because of his celebrity (plus ça change) and perhaps in larger part because, as member of the Lords, he advocated legislation to create the first safety standards for electric utility companies. The wives of electrical engineers helped domesticate electricity by becoming the authors of very popular advocacy books: some of them, like Decorative Electricity (1892) devoted to aestheticizing (Gooday's word) electric lighting and others, like Electric Cooking, Heating and Cleaning: A Manual of Electricity in the Service of the Home (1914) by analogizing electricity to servants. These good ladies are part of the reason for the word ‘gender’ in Gooday's subtitle; so are the socially prominent ladies who demonstrated the safety of electricity by wearing fanciful battery-operated accessories on formal, public occasions. The electric supply companies are important to Gooday's story because they reduced uncertainty (another part of his subtitle) by manufacturing and selling electric fuses (lessening the risk of fire from surges of current). The supply companies also increased the potential (!) for aesthetic satisfaction by taming the awful glare that the ladies of Hatfield House (and many others) had found so objectionable: hiring seamstresses to design and make up ‘dainty silk shades’ for their ‘high class’ electric light fittings.

A book that recounted the exploits of such a diverse cast of characters – all crucial agents of technological modernity – could, should, have been absolutely fascinating, but, sadly, this one is not. Gooday is, unfortunately, not much of a prose stylist; his book abounds with lengthy passively constructed sentences like this one:

He also is an unremittingly scholarly nit-picker, constantly interrupting paragraphs with the interjection ‘Pace Jones’ or ‘Pace Smith’, sometimes many pages after he has explained his criticism (usually minor) of whatever it was Jones or Smith might have said. Furthermore, and probably not Gooday's fault, the book is profusely illustrated, as it should be, but the images are so small that they are visually indecipherable. I had to take a magnifying glass to one image (p. 169) which is captioned with the instruction to ‘Notice the men enjoying the bright illumination ...’ before I could make out that there were male figures in it at all, let alone that they were enjoying themselves.

In short, a difficult read, but a read worth undertaking for anyone interested in the diffusion of innovation in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.