For most of recorded history, nights were long and dark. Even among the very wealthy, candles were an extravagance that were only burned in large numbers with company (one visitor to an 18th century Virginia aristocrat's home noted with awe that when the worthy gentleman had guests over, he had six candles burning in a single room).
But in the early 20th century, we saw the rapid expansion of electronic lighting in the form of incandescent light bulbs. I'm not sure how long it took for them to become affordable to most people, but surely even in the 1910s more and more people were experiencing nights illuminated by electronic light.
This seems like a profound change in the way we experienced the cycle of day and night, one that perhaps had dramatic implications for the way we understood time and what kind of activities could take place after the setting of the sun.
How did people feel about this? Unalloyed joy at "progress?" Anxiety about this change in how we view and interact with the night?
On a related note; are there any recorded complaints concerning alleged health issues regarding electrical lighting similar to the ones seen nowadays complaining of exposure to WiFi? If so, how were those viewed at the time?
People had been changing the way that they interacted with the night (nice phrase, btw) throughout the nineteenth century, so there was not exactly the profound alteration that you're thinking of to startle them.
Over the course of the first half of the century, the use of whale/lard oil lamps increased as increasingly complex and efficient argand burners were developed: astral lamps, for instance, used a wick woven by machine to have a hollow core, which sat in a metal holder connected to the fuel reservoir and was surrounded with a glass chimney; solar lamps were similar, but had a metal cone placed around the wick to focus the flow of the air up to the top of the flame to make it burn brighter without being noticeably hotter; sinumbra/annular lamps kept the fuel in a donut-shaped reservoir around the burner, which supposedly prevented it from casting a shadow. 1860-1900 is known among lamp enthusiasts (they exist) as "the kerosene era", since the introduction of cheap, clean(ish) petroleum fuel wiped out the use of whale and lard oil. The technical improvements of the oil lamps were unnecessary, as the kerosene could produce a bright light without a fancy burner or strange fuel reservoir systems.
Gaslighting was available from the early nineteenth century; by the middle of the century was common in cities - it required a certain level of infrastructure, like electric lights, since gas was piped in rather than kept in a reservoir for an individual lamp - and it continued to be used in rural areas once it arrived there until electrification came, sometimes relatively far into the twentieth century. It was frequently used for municipal outdoor lighting, although gas streetlights required someone to come around and light them individually, and in areas of a city or town with streetlights and gas-lit shops, theaters, and restaurants, the idea of a middle-class nightlife was becoming solidified. However, gas lights could put off a certain amount of heat (particularly when many were lit in the same room) and replaced the oxygen in a room with carbon dioxide and monoxide; when not working properly, they could leak or explode.
Electric light was known from earlier in the nineteenth century than you might think: flickery, fiddly electric arc light was used in lighthouses, searchlights, some factories, high-end shops, and railroad stations in Britain and France even before Edison showed an improved incandescent bulb at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Demonstrations of municipal electric lighting in the 1870s were generally met with astonishment and pleasure as novelties, since they were brighter than gas lights and lacked smell and heat. Like the arc lights, early incandescent bulbs could be fiddly and expensive, but as they were refined they became more popular. In general, the middle classes were eager to have their towns adopt electric lighting in the late nineteenth century in order to show that they weren't backwards and could keep up with the times. The benefits to health and cleanliness were also seen as worthwhile, particularly when it came to domestic use. By the 1910s, electric streetlights would have been very ordinary to people in cities and towns across America, and many houses and apartment buildings were electrified. Poorer rural areas, however, typically did not see electric light until the 1930s.
Gas lights had already begun to push the idea of working after sundown or before sunrise, but electricity made that easier and easier. In some cases, tenement dwellers actually got more light suitable for working when the outside lights came on than they did from the sun during the day, due to the huge structures around them. It's hard to know what the workers themselves felt: Ernest Freeburg, in The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America, cites textile millworkers in the 1840s being outraged at the expectation that they would work by gaslight into the night, but a later tenement family finding the arc light from the Brooklyn Bridge coming into their windows as useful and good. As far as I can tell, middle-class social reformers did feel some anxiety about the disruption this posed to the sleep cycle and the proper rhythms of life, but the members of the working classes, who were already trying to do a lot of home piecework in low or flickering lights, typically enjoyed being able to see better by electric light than gas or kerosene.
Great question! This is a heavily trodden topic. The street light, combined with other things like the broadening of city roads, made Victorian society a much more "visible" place.
Michel Foucault and other historians have claimed that this led to a new system of power in liberal Europe. No longer did you need heavy-duty police forces to impose order. It made it easier for authorities to regulate people's behavior, while at the same time it implicated people in regulating their own behavior. You could not be invisible at night anymore - there was always the chance someone could see you. For a modern example, think of the way most of us do not speed down the highway, even when it is totally barren of other cars, because of the chance that there might be a police car staked out somewhere. The streetlight is key to Foucault's argument that liberal society became a "panopticon" of sorts, where heightened visibility and social control rather than repression structured systems of power.
I can't say much about what people themselves thought about it, unfortunately. However, how they felt would have depended strongly on class and gender. There was a great deal of unevenness to the advent of lighting. The Victorian or Edwardian male citizen would have not had much to worry about, as he could probably turn his lights on or off with a switch. Much of the lower classes, whether in lodging houses, prisons, or working as servants, would have had no control over their light supply, which made it much easier for authorities to intrude on their lives.
Sources:
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Chris Otter - The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910
I recommend you check out Otter's book if you are interested!