The figure you will find everywhere is 2,000 words on a good day, and it is probably close. It is also a modern reconstruction rather than something Dickens said. The number he genuinely had to hit was monthly, it was enforced by a printing schedule he could not move, and it is far more useful to a working writer.
Where the 2,000-Word Figure Comes From
Dickens never published a daily quota. He kept no chart like Hemingway's and left no line in the letters setting a target. The 2,000 figure entered wide circulation through Mason Currey's Daily Rituals in 2013, which describes an ordinary day producing about two thousand words and a good one producing roughly twice that. Currey built the account on the recollections of Charles Dickens Jr., who said no city clerk was ever more methodical than his father.
Run the arithmetic and the number holds. A monthly installment averaged close to 17,700 words, and Dickens typically had about two working weeks to produce one inside his nine-to-two block. That lands somewhere between 1,700 and 1,900 words per writing day. The reconstruction is sound. It is still a reconstruction, and worth labelling as one.
The Number the Schedule Actually Enforced
Every monthly novel came out in 20 parts across 19 months, priced at a shilling, running 32 pages of text plus two illustrations, with the final part doubled up. Counting the published texts of eight monthly novels gives a per-installment average around 17,700 words, from 15,800 for The Pickwick Papers up to 18,700 for Dombey and Son. Philip Allingham's figure on the Victorian Web, 18,500 words per number, sits in the same place.
The weekly serials were tighter and worse. Hard Times ran 20 weekly parts of roughly 5,200 words each, and A Tale of Two Cities ran 31 parts at about 4,400. Great Expectations needed 36 at around 5,100. Allingham records the physical constraint behind those figures: each weekly number had to fill exactly eight columns of All the Year Round. Dickens loathed it and said so to John Forster in February 1854.
The difficulty of the space is CRUSHING. Nobody can have an idea of it who has not had an experience of patient fiction-writing with some elbow-room always, and open places in perspective.
Charles Dickens, letter to John Forster, February 1854
The capitals are his. He was writing Hard Times at the time, and he handled the problem by drafting at monthly-number scale and then cutting the result into weekly segments, which tells you how deeply the monthly rhythm had become his natural unit.
How Long the Books Actually Run
Counted from the public-domain texts, the monthly novels cluster around a third of a million words. Dombey and Son and David Copperfield both land near 355,000, with Bleak House just under 353,500. Little Dorrit comes in around 337,000, Our Mutual Friend around 325,000, and The Pickwick Papers around 300,000.
The weekly books are much shorter. Great Expectations runs about 184,500 words and A Tale of Two Cities about 136,000. Hard Times is roughly 103,000, less than a third of a monthly novel. A Christmas Carol is 28,500 words and was written in six weeks in the autumn of 1843, which averages out near 680 words a day.
Across the fifteen novels, the Christmas books, the travel writing, the collected journalism, and Sketches by Boz, the published total comes to roughly 4.8 million words. More than 14,000 of his letters survive on top of that. He died at 58.
For the full picture of how he worked, including the study at Gad's Hill, the blue ink, and the fifteen-mile afternoon walks, see the complete Charles Dickens writing routine page.
Reading how Charles Dickens worked is the easy part. The Writer's Daily Practice gives you a page for every morning of the year, and each one ends with a prompt to get you writing.
Get the Book on Amazon →365 mornings, in paperback and Kindle.
What You Can Steal
- A deadline you cannot move beats a target you set yourself. Dickens hit 32 pages a month for decades because a printer, an illustrator, and a paying readership were waiting on them.
- Pick a unit bigger than a day. The monthly number gave him room for slow mornings without letting the book slip. A weekly or monthly quota absorbs a bad Tuesday in a way a daily one cannot.
- Compression is the expensive part. The weekly serials produced his shortest, tightest books and cost him the most misery. Shorter is harder.
- Write the installment, not the novel. Nobody sits down to produce 353,000 words. Dickens sat down to produce this month's 32 pages, nineteen times in a row.