How many words are in David Copperfield?
by Charles Dickens · 1850 · Literary Fiction
354,826
Word count
24 hr 51 min
Reading time
1,420
Est. pages
1850
Published
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens is approximately 354,826 wordslong. At an average reading speed of 238 words per minute, that's about 24 hr 51 min of reading spread across several sittings. First published in 1850, it sits in the Literary Fiction category.
Typical literary fiction novels run 70,000–100,000 words, with a sweet spot around 80,000–90,000. At 354,826 words, David Copperfield runs longer than the typical range, in epic territory.
Source: Word count computed from the Project Gutenberg plain-text edition (eBook #766, public domain) · referenceVerified 2026-06-21
Literary Fiction novels of similar length
| Title | Author | Word count |
|---|---|---|
| Bleak House | Charles Dickens | 353,463 |
| Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | 349,775 |
| Middlemarch | George Eliot | 316,389 |
| Vanity Fair | William Makepeace Thackeray | 302,384 |
| Don Quixote | Miguel de Cervantes | 427,246 |
| The Count of Monte Cristo | Alexandre Dumas | 460,976 |