19th-Century Literature
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50 free 19th-Century Literature trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The nineteenth century gave readers the modern novel, the detective story, science fiction and most of the characters people still dress up as. Books arrived in monthly instalments, authors hid behind invented names, and a hit serial could hold a whole country in suspense. This quiz covers the century across Britain, America, France, Russia and beyond: Dickens and Austen, Tolstoy and Twain, Hugo, Melville, Poe and the Brontë sisters. Expect plots and characters, the real people behind pen names, first drafts that were burned or renamed, and endings that later adaptations changed. It suits book clubs, English classes and pub quiz writers, and anyone who wants to find out how much of the classics shelf they remember. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which author began Frankenstein at eighteen after a ghost-story challenge near Lake Geneva?
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley was 18 when she started the story, and its first edition came out anonymously in 1818, when she was 20. Her name went on the title page only in later editions.
Q 02Which Russian novelist was led out to a firing squad, then reprieved at the last moment and sent to Siberia?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky was condemned for joining a circle that discussed banned books, and the death sentence was commuted at the last moment. Four years in a hard labour camp followed.
Q 03Which children's character died by hanging at the original ending of Carlo Collodi's 1881 serial?
Pinocchio
Pinocchio dies hanged in Chapter 15, where the serial first stopped. Reader demand and the editor's request brought the puppet back for the chapters in which he becomes a real boy.
Q 04Which Hans Christian Andersen heroine dies at dawn after the prince she loves marries someone else?
The Little Mermaid
The Little Mermaid dissolves into foam and becomes a spirit of the air instead of winning the prince. Andersen's working title for the tale was Daughters of the Air.
Q 05Which young Gascon, the hero of The Three Musketeers, is not actually one of the three of the title?
D'Artagnan
D'Artagnan leaves Gascony for Paris hoping to join the Musketeers of the Guard, and is befriended by the trio of Athos, Porthos and Aramis. He was loosely based on a real soldier.
Q 06Which Massachusetts poet saw only ten of her nearly 1,800 poems published during her lifetime?
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson kept her writing so private that few people knew of it until her younger sister Lavinia found the poems in her desk after her death. The first volume appeared four years later.
Q 07Which Jane Austen novel about a family of five daughters was first drafted as First Impressions?
Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice began in 1796 as First Impressions. When Austen's father offered that draft to a London publisher the next year, his letter came back marked as declined by return of post.
Q 08Under which pen name did Oxford mathematics lecturer Charles Dodgson publish his children's classics?
Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll is a play on his real name: Charles Lutwidge was put into Latin as Carolus Ludovicus, turned back into English and then reversed.
Q 09Which captain hunts the white whale that bit off his leg in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick?
Ahab
Ahab's quest for vengeance drives a book that flopped: Moby-Dick was a commercial failure and was out of print when its author died in 1891.
Q 10Which Charles Dickens novel has a workhouse orphan, chosen by lot, ask for another portion of gruel?
Oliver Twist
Oliver Twist is the loser when the hungry workhouse boys draw lots over who must ask. The story ran as a magazine serial from 1837 to 1839.
Q 11Which Victor Hugo novel follows ex-convict Jean Valjean through to the June Rebellion of 1832 in Paris?
Les Misérables
Les Misérables took its hero partly from life: Valjean is loosely based on Eugène François Vidocq, an ex-convict who went on to found France's first criminal investigative agency.
Q 12Which Irish author wrote Dracula while working as business manager of London's Lyceum Theatre?
Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker travelled the world on the theatre company's tours yet never visited Eastern Europe, the setting that made his most famous novel.
Q 13Which Mark Twain novel is narrated by a boy rafting down the Mississippi with Jim, a runaway slave?
Huckleberry Finn
Q 21Which author's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 300,000 copies in the United States in its first year?
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe first published it as a 40-week serial in an abolitionist periodical. It was planned to run for only a few weeks, but she expanded the story and it was instantly popular.
Q 22Which Nathaniel Hawthorne heroine must wear a red letter on her dress as punishment in Puritan Boston?
Hester Prynne
Hester Prynne is sentenced to stand on the scaffold for three hours and to wear the letter for the rest of her life, after bearing a child of unknown paternity.
Q 23Which bell-ringer of Notre-Dame cathedral loves the street dancer Esmeralda in Victor Hugo's 1831 novel?
Huckleberry Finn tells it all in his own vernacular, and the book was widely criticized for coarse language on release. One Massachusetts public library committee excluded it from the shelves.
Q 14Which novel did Emily Brontë publish as Ellis Bell a year before her death at the age of thirty?
Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights is the only novel she wrote. All three sisters published under male pseudonyms with the same surname, appearing in print as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.
Q 15Which master of Thornfield Hall is revealed at the altar to be already married in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre?
Mr. Rochester
Mr. Rochester is exposed in mid-ceremony, when a lawyer declares that he cannot marry Jane because he already has a wife, Bertha, the cause of the strange happenings in the house.
Q 16Which Leo Tolstoy novel follows Russian aristocratic families through the French invasion led by Napoleon?
War and Peace
War and Peace weaves five interlocking family narratives together with chapters in which Tolstoy steps outside the story to discuss history and philosophy.
Q 17Which Jules Verne novel begins with Phileas Fogg staking half his fortune at London's Reform Club?
Around the World in Eighty Days
Around the World in Eighty Days has Fogg bet £20,000 that he can make the trip in time, then carry his remaining £20,000 along to cover the expenses.
Q 18Which one-legged ship's cook is the secret leader of the pirates in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island?
Long John Silver
Long John Silver so dominates the story that its working title was The Sea Cook. He fixed the popular image of the one-legged seaman with a parrot on his shoulder.
Q 19Which playwright's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was quoted against him in court in 1895?
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde first published the story as a shorter tale in an American magazine in 1890, and the novel-length version followed the next year.
Q 20Which of the March sisters in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women is the tomboy who writes?
Jo
Jo shares the family home with traditional Meg, pianist Beth and artist Amy. The novel is loosely based on the lives of the author and her own three sisters.
Quasimodo
Quasimodo was deafened by the loud ringing of the bells, so his guardian taught him sign language. He had been found abandoned at the cathedral as a small child.
Q 24Which American author created both Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow?
Washington Irving
Washington Irving also gave New York City its nickname Gotham in an 1807 magazine, and is credited as the first American to earn his living solely by his pen.
Q 25Under which male pen name did Mary Ann Evans publish Middlemarch and Silas Marner?
George Eliot
George Eliot wanted to escape the stereotype that women's writing was light fare, not to be taken very seriously. The name may also have shielded her private life from public scrutiny.
Q 26Which English poet, author of Don Juan, died of fever in 1824 while fighting for Greek independence?
Lord Byron
Lord Byron joined the Greek fight against the Ottoman Empire and died at 36 after the sieges of Missolonghi. Greeks revere him as a folk hero.
Q 27Which war's Battle of Balaclava inspired Alfred Tennyson's poem The Charge of the Light Brigade?
Crimean War
The Crimean War reached Tennyson through The Times, and he wrote the poem in a few minutes from his recollection of the newspaper's account of the cavalry's losses.
Q 28Which H. G. Wells novel has Martians in three-legged fighting machines overrun Surrey and London?
The War of the Worlds
The War of the Worlds ends without a human victory: the invaders are killed by earthly pathogens, to which they have no immunity.
Q 29What is the name of Captain Nemo's submarine in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas?
Nautilus
Nautilus runs on electric batteries, and its design is regarded as ahead of its time: real submarines of the 1860s were comparatively primitive vessels.
Q 30Which Charles Dickens character, jilted on her wedding day, stops her clocks and never takes off the dress?
Miss Havisham
Miss Havisham stopped every clock in the mansion at twenty minutes to nine, the exact time she received the letter telling her she had been left at the altar.