The main and running titles of Walter Scott’s 1814 novel offer a convenient starting point for speculating about differences between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historically minded fiction. Waverley – like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1765–7), and (with some irony) Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771) – signals the exemplary status of its hero. The running title, Or, ’Tis Sixty years Since foregrounds the mediatory temporal distance that earlier writers, including Jane Barker and Daniel Defoe, make critical to their representation of historical events and that, as this chapter will detail, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne also utilize. Only with the nineteenth-century novel, however, as the synoptic Waverley; Or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since suggests, is the integration of historical change and individual maturity made central to the understanding of what is lost and gained both publicly and personally with the passage of time. In Waverley’s final chapter, “A Postscript, which should have been a Preface,” Scott juxtaposes the “complete … political and economical” alteration of Scotland after the collapse of the second Jacobite rebellion in 1745 and the nearly “vanished” cultural memory of those of the generations before his “who still cherished a lingering, though hopeless attachment to the house of Stuart.” Scott’s balancing here of the empirical and the elegiac, the political and the sentimental, presumes a stable vantage point that enables critical appraisal and idealization of the past. In Tom Jones, Humphry Clinker, and Tristram Shandy, the mid-century novels that begin self-consciously to manipulate the relationship between completed and ongoing historical experience, that stability remains elusive. As this chapter will argue, in these novels threatened identities – individual, social, and national – are instead the focus of attention. Their resolutions correspondingly depend less on the naturalizing of changes in consciousness pursued in Waverley, and more on the sanctioning of institutions by authorial fiat. By the 1790s, as the concluding examination of Charlotte Smith’s Old Manor House (1793) and George Walker’s The Vagabond (1799) will suggest, such narrative manipulations in the face of revolutionary unrest have a distinctly tendentious air. The internalizing of historical processes by Scott’s heroes seems, from this perspective, a response to the impasse reached when late eighteenth-century fictions look to external factors to reconcile singularity and sociability with support for existing hierarchies.