The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition vs The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
15,045words between them — 1h 00m of it
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition is longer — 448,628 words against 433,583 for The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete, a difference of 15,045 words or about 1h 00m of extra reading. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition is the harder read, at grade 11.1 against 9.3.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition | The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Poe, Edgar Allan | Forster, John |
| Words | 448,628 | 433,583 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 29h 55m | 28h 54m |
| Unique words | 23,767 | 24,105 |
| Sentences | 18,565 | 21,343 |
| Average sentence length | 24.2 words | 20.3 words |
| Reading grade | 11.1 | 9.3 |
| Reading ease | 58.6 | 64.4 |
| Long words | 11.3% | 10.5% |
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 = |448,628 − 433,583| = 15,045 words 15,045 ÷ 250 wpm = 1h 00m of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition or The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete?
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition is longer — 448,628 words against 433,583 for The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete, a difference of 15,045 words or about 1h 00m of extra reading. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition is the harder read, at grade 11.1 against 9.3.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 25525 and no. 25851 — 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.
