Great Expectations Book Quiz
Eight multiple-choice questions on Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) — plot, characters and the moments everyone quotes. Two minutes, instant score, every answer explained below. For the full mixed-classics version, take the original book quiz — 15 questions across the whole canon.
All 8 questions and answers
Prefer to read the quiz instead of taking it? Expand for every question, answer and a one-line explanation.
- What is Pip's full name? — Philip Pirrip. 'My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip... I called myself Pip.'
- Whom does Pip help in the churchyard on Christmas? — The escaped convict Abel Magwitch. The file and the food Pip steals — the seed of the entire fortune.
- What happened to Miss Havisham? — She was jilted at the altar and froze her life at that hour. The yellowed wedding dress, the rotting cake, every clock stopped at twenty to nine.
- Who is Estella? — Miss Havisham's adopted daughter, trained to break hearts. Raised as an instrument of revenge on the male sex.
- Who is Pip's secret benefactor? — The convict Magwitch, made rich in Australia. Not the gentle source Pip assumed for years — the novel's great reversal.
- Who is Joe Gargery? — Pip's brother-in-law, the gentle village blacksmith. The moral center: patient, kind, humbly loyal while Pip is ashamed of him.
- Who are Jaggers and Wemmick? — Pip's London lawyer and his clerk. The lawyer who knows too much; the clerk with a fortress home and a portable property.
- Who are Estella's real parents? — Magwitch and Molly, Jaggers's housekeeper. The secret Pip uses, late, for mercy rather than gossip.
About Great Expectations
Dickens's 1861 coming-of-age novel: Pip, a blacksmith's boy, helps a convict in a graveyard, is called to eerie Miss Havisham's to play, and suddenly receives 'great expectations' of a fortune — which turn out to come from the last source he imagined. The novel runs about 183,000 words (roughly 544 pages in a standard paperback) — about 12 hours and 49 minutes of reading at an average pace. Before you commit, see the full breakdown in how long it takes to read Great Expectations or calculate reading time for any other book.
Moderate — first-person retrospective; the most unified of Dickens's plots. If you get 6 or more of the eight questions right, the book clearly stuck.
What this quiz covers
Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations sits in our victorian london shelf, and the eight questions follow the book the way a reader experiences it: how the story opens, the turn in the middle, the characters who carry it, and the ending people still argue about. You will not be asked for page numbers or publication trivia — but three or four questions are built to separate people who read the book from people who read a summary. If a question stumps you, that gap is your reading list talking.
Fair warning for the ambitious: readers who clear this quiz often move straight to the reading-time breakdown for Great Expectations to plan the reread, then test the rest of their shelf against the mixed classic literature quiz.
More book quizzes
Heart of Darkness quiz, The Time Machine quiz, A Tale of Two Cities quiz, The Hound of the Baskervilles quiz, 1984 quiz, Animal Farm quiz, Brave New World quiz — or browse every book quiz on the site. For scale, Great Expectations is the 15th longest of the 133 classics timed here — shorter than Little Women but longer than Catch-22.
Doing the whole author? Our Charles Dickens books in order guide lists every book with the best entry point.
Frequently asked questions
How many questions are in the Great Expectations quiz?
Eight multiple-choice questions covering Charles Dickens's plot, characters and most famous moments. The quiz takes about two minutes and your score is instant.
Is the Great Expectations book quiz free?
Yes — no signup, no email, nothing to install. Answer the eight questions and get your score immediately.
What score should I aim for?
8/8 means you know the book cold; 6+ is a solid score. Below 4, the book is calling you back for a reread.
Is the Great Expectations quiz hard?
Moderate — first-person retrospective; the most unified of Dickens's plots. The questions themselves stick to famous, load-bearing moments — the scenes and lines the book is remembered for — so a genuine read usually scores 6+.
How long is the Great Expectations reading itself?
About 183,000 words — roughly 544 pages, or about 12 hours and 49 minutes at an average pace. The full pace breakdown is in how long it takes to read Great Expectations. It runs 59 chapters, averaging 3,101 words each; see the book-count guide for its full structure.