The article seeks to present the career of Thomas Chatterton, an eighteenth-century literary forger, whose title to fame lies in an attempt to hoodwink Horace Walpole and to persuade him to publish „medieval poems”, supposedly discovered by Chatterton in the cellars of his parish church. When his hoax was discovered, Chatterton committed suicide. His tragic story made him an inspiration for many Romantic poets. Chatterton's last moments also became the subject of a well-known painting by the Victorian artist Henry Wallis. he article studies Chatterton's „posthumous career” in the context of predominant themes of Romantic poetry, and especially the concept of Romantic hero.

In line with recent critical approaches to George Eliot that increasingly question her reputation as a realist writer, the article seeks to analyse the plot and characterisation in George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical (1866) with reference to popular (and especially sensational and melodramatic) tropes often found in fiction of the period. The article discusses such plot elements as the trial scene in which the heroine gives testimony in order to help the hero, the heroine’s renouncement of her fortune, and the figures of a fallen woman (treated as a cautionary example by the heroine) and of a mysterious suitor with a troubled past.