The Victorian period shares the characteristics that mark other cultural periods. It lasts about fifty years, in its case from the accession of Victoria to the throne in 1840 to the performance in London in 1893 of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome”, so different in texture from the melodrama and sanctimonious morality of Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray”, which had appeared earlier in the year, and so illustrates another characteristic of periods, which is that periods come to abrupt ends and beginnings. (Queen Victoria herself lingered on until 1901.) A cultural period also has a set of themes that are unifying among the various arts of literature and painting and drama, which in the case of the Victorian means the fate of the individual in the complex world of the city and in the midst of an industrialized landscape, every person both ambitious to make their own way and also alienated from what seems emotionally unsatisfying about generally accepted customs and overly rigorous laws, as that is exemplified by both Oliver Twist and Jean Valjean. A cultural period is also international in scope in that all the nations of Europe and North America are part of it even if it is known in France as the era of Pre-Impressionism and Impressionism in honor of the central role of painting in French culture during those years. A cultural period is also dominated by certain cultural forms, and in the Victorian that means the novel and grand opera, both of which are sprawling affairs, employing plots and subplots wherein often outrageously individual characters play out their lives against the background of a richly imagined society. Think of “Great Expectations”, “The Count of Monte Cristo”, and “Rigoletto”.