The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete vs The Mysteries of London, v. 4/4
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
4,694words between them — 19 min of it
The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete is longer — 433,583 words against 428,889 for The Mysteries of London, v. 4/4, a difference of 4,694 words or about 19 min of extra reading. The Mysteries of London, v. 4/4 is the harder read, at grade 13 against 9.3.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete | The Mysteries of London, v. 4/4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Forster, John | Reynolds, George W. M. (George William MacArthur) |
| Words | 433,583 | 428,889 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 28h 54m | 28h 36m |
| Unique words | 24,105 | 22,863 |
| Sentences | 21,343 | 15,063 |
| Average sentence length | 20.3 words | 28.5 words |
| Reading grade | 9.3 | 13 |
| Reading ease | 64.4 | 52.4 |
| Long words | 10.5% | 12% |
Highlighted cells are the larger figure — except reading ease, where higher means easier.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions, same counting rule·REVIEWED JUL 2026
How this is worked out
- Both texts are counted the same way, from the same source, with Gutenberg's header and licence footer struck first.
- The gap is stated in words and then in time at 250 words a minute — the rate is printed because a duration without one cannot be checked.
- Difficulty is compared on Flesch–Kincaid grade, which reads sentence and word length only. It cannot see irony or dialect, so treat it as a measure of surface, not of effort.
gap = |433,583 − 428,889| = 4,694 words 4,694 ÷ 250 wpm = 19 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete or The Mysteries of London, v. 4/4?
The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete is longer — 433,583 words against 428,889 for The Mysteries of London, v. 4/4, a difference of 4,694 words or about 19 min of extra reading. The Mysteries of London, v. 4/4 is the harder read, at grade 13 against 9.3.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 25851 and no. 51649 — and from no other source. Neither book’s text is set on this site.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·US public domain·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Word counts and reading levels are computed from a specific public-domain edition and will differ from other editions and from other counting methods — see the method page.
