The website goodreads.com contains reader ratings of millions of books including those by Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton. The table below contains ten most rated books by each of the two authors in question ordered according to average rating. By most rated I mean the books with maximum numbers of ratings. One may object that I should have selected the highest rated books. However this way the rare or foreign language editions with a single 5 star rating get on top.
| Author | Book | Average rating | Number of ratings | Percent of top ratings |
| Dickens | A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings | 4.11 | 18624 | 40.0% |
| Dickens | A Christmas Carol, The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth | 4.09 | 29317 | 39.4% |
| Bulwer-Lytton | Zanoni: A Rosicrucian Tale | 4.01 | 129 | 37.0% |
| Bulwer-Lytton | Rienzi, Last of the Roman Tribunes | 4 | 13 | 23.1% |
| Dickens | A Christmas Carol | 3.98 | 231038 | 32.9% |
| Dickens | Bleak House | 3.97 | 43509 | 36.7% |
| Dickens | Little Dorrit | 3.94 | 20034 | 32.9% |
| Dickens | David Copperfield | 3.92 | 92783 | 33.3% |
| Bulwer-Lytton | Pelham or Adventures of a Gentleman | 3.86 | 28 | 28.6% |
| Bulwer-Lytton | Paul Clifford | 3.8 | 20 | 20.0% |
| Dickens | Oliver Twist | 3.79 | 133568 | 23.4% |
| Dickens | A Tale of Two Cities | 3.74 | 454445 | 29.3% |
| Dickens | Great Expectations | 3.68 | 283732 | 25.5% |
| Bulwer-Lytton | Harold: The Last of the Saxon Kings | 3.65 | 26 | 7.7% |
| Bulwer-Lytton | The Haunted and the Haunters | 3.61 | 93 | 28.6% |
| Bulwer-Lytton | The Last Days of Pompeii | 3.6 | 684 | 17.9% |
| Dickens | Hard Times, A Longman Cultural Edition | 3.46 | 24630 | 16.6% |
| Bulwer-Lytton | A Strange Story | 3.44 | 25 | 12.0% |
| Bulwer-Lytton | Money | 3.22 | 9 | 11.1% |
| Bulwer-Lytton | The Coming Race | 3.18 | 363 | 19.0% |
As you can see from the table the real difference between Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton is in the number of ratings (which, one can guess, is proportional to the number of readers). For Dickens’s books from the list this number ranges from 18,624 to 454,445. For Bulwer’s books it ranges between 9 and 684. Even the most read Bulwer’s book is 27 times less read than the least read Dickens’s book from the list. On average, Bulwer’s books are thousand times less read than Dickens’s.
However, rating-wise Dickens’s advantage is meager. The average rating listed in the table of Dickens’s books is 3.87. For Bulwer this number is 3.64. The Dickens’s rating is only 6% higher than Bulwer’s. In addition many particular Bulwer’s books are rated higher than many particular Dickens’s books.
One may argue that the average rating is not a very useful parameter. For example, an average 3 star rating can consist of 100% three star ratings or of 50% one star ratings and 50% five star ratings. In the first case nobody really liked the book but in the second case half of the readers liked it. One may argue that the fraction of 5 star ratings is the important metric since it shows the fraction of real fans. For this purpose I gave the percentages of 5 star ratings in the right column of the table. The average percentage of 5 star ratings for Dickens is 31% and for Bulwer it is 21.5%. So Dickens has a 1.5 times bigger fraction of 5 star ratings than Bulwer. This is a noticeable difference but it does not signify any fundamental difference between the two authors. It falls far short from the thousand-fold difference in the number of readers. In addition several of Bulwer’s books have a higher fraction of 5 star ratings than several Dickens’s books.
So it is just that indeed. The famous writers just have more readers.
