This article aims at describing reference chains in a corpus of 19th century novel incipits. The quantitative and qualitative methods of linguistics applied in this study complement and shed a new light on the literary approaches of novel incipits. Not only do reference chains participate in the topoï identified by literary analyses, but they can also be considered as actual topoï themselves. Moreover, the cross linguistic variations found in the study show that the Germanic vs. Romance language distinction is not as clear-cut as it is traditionally said.