Dickens wrote two first-person novels about a boy growing into a gentleman, eleven years apart, and they are usually compared because they are usually the two people recommend. David Copperfield (1850) follows its hero from birth through school, apprenticeship, a bad marriage and a career; Great Expectations (1861) begins in a churchyard with an escaped convict and is structured around a secret.
Copperfield is the warmer book and the longer one — about 357,000 words against 184,000 — and it carries more of Dickens’s own life, including the blacking factory. Great Expectations is tighter and colder: Pip’s shame is the engine, and the ending was rewritten after Dickens’s friend Bulwer-Lytton objected to the first version.
If you want Dickens as a companion for a month, take Copperfield. If you want the same material compressed and sharpened, take Great Expectations, which many readers finish in a week and remember longer.
Both were serialised before they appeared as books — Copperfield monthly, Great Expectations weekly in All the Year Round — and both were written while Dickens was editing a magazine, which is why their chapter endings are shaped to be waited for. The two books also end differently: Copperfield closes with a family scene, Great Expectations with a meeting on a misty evening whose last lines Dickens revised on advice.
Side by side
Both editions are on this site, so the word counts and reading times are the numbers of the files you download. Screen versions are counted from the verified filmographies on the site; “none listed” means no version has been verified there yet, not that none exists.
| Great Expectations | David Copperfield | |
|---|---|---|
| Published | 1861 | 1850 |
| Author | Charles Dickens | Charles Dickens |
| Words here | 184,000 | 357,000 |
| Reading time | 10 h | 20 h |
| Screen versions | 4 | 10 |
| Free edition | Great Expectations | David Copperfield |
How to choose
- Read David Copperfield if you want the fuller autobiography and do not mind the length.
- Read Great Expectations if you want a shorter, more plotted Dickens with a mystery at the centre.
- Both editions here are complete, with the same word-count method used site-wide.
Questions readers ask
Which is autobiographical?
David Copperfield, most directly: the blacking-factory episode and the portrait of Mr Micawber both draw on Dickens’s own youth.
Was the ending of Great Expectations changed?
Yes. Dickens wrote a bleaker ending first and, on Bulwer-Lytton’s advice, produced the more conciliatory version usually printed.
Which is longer?
David Copperfield is nearly twice the length: about 357,000 words against 184,000.
Both novels are in the complete catalogue. More head-to-head comparisons are in the comparison index, and word counts for everything are in the word-count table.