| Zusammenfassung: | Despite the significance of Walter Scott's fiction for Victorian writers, he is too often either left outside of our literary lineages or only incorporated as a leading figure in historical fiction. I argue that Scott was the foundational novelist for a definitive form of Victorian fiction, the chronicle. Chronicles exhibit three key features: first, they are more likely to have settings (the Highlands, Barsetshire, Carlingford) than plots; second, chronicles are potentially endless; and third, they are non-protagonistic, telling the story of a group rather than an individual. These features can all be found in Scott's metafictional prefaces and frame narratives, which set the tone for an important strand of nineteenth-century fiction in the chronicles of writers such as Charlotte Yonge, Anthony Trollope, and Margaret Oliphant.
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