Vanity Fair vs The Pickwick Papers
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
2,213words between them — 9 min of it
Vanity Fair is longer — 302,568 words against 300,355 for The Pickwick Papers, a difference of 2,213 words or about 9 min of extra reading. Vanity Fair is the harder read, at grade 9.8 against 7.8.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Vanity Fair | The Pickwick Papers | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Thackeray, William Makepeace | Dickens, Charles |
| Words | 302,568 | 300,355 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 20h 10m | 20h 01m |
| Unique words | 18,769 | 17,580 |
| Sentences | 13,229 | 17,676 |
| Average sentence length | 22.9 words | 17 words |
| Reading grade | 9.8 | 7.8 |
| Reading ease | 65.2 | 69.6 |
| Long words | 8.8% | 9.1% |
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 = |302,568 − 300,355| = 2,213 words 2,213 ÷ 250 wpm = 9 min of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Vanity Fair or The Pickwick Papers?
Vanity Fair is longer — 302,568 words against 300,355 for The Pickwick Papers, a difference of 2,213 words or about 9 min of extra reading. Vanity Fair is the harder read, at grade 9.8 against 7.8.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 599 and no. 580 — 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.
