← Fame through time1837
1837
Whose working lives fell in 1837. Books are measured from 1800 and readers from 2015, so for this period we can say who lived then, not who was talked about then.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in 1837, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Victor Hugo22 decades - 2
Alexandre Dumasnot measured- - 3
Georg Büchner17 decades - 4
Lajos Kossuth7 decades - 5
Pavel Nakhimov11 decades - 6
Archduke Franz Karl of Austria0 decades - 7
Harriet Martineau19 decades - 8
Miguel I of Portugal0 decades - 9
Mariano José de Larra19 decades - 10
Elias Lönnrot0 decades - 11
Louis-Eugène Cavaignac16 decades - 12
Charles Wheatstone19 decades - 13
Nikolaus Lenau19 decades - 14
Dorothea Dix13 decades - 15
János Bolyainot measured- - 16
Dalai Lama 10 Tsultrim Gyatsonot measured- - 17
Edwin Landseer20 decades - 18
Niccolò Tommaseo20 decades - 19
Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire14 decades - 20
Lydia Maria Child16 decades - 21
Alcide d'Orbigny0 decades - 22
Mariano Arista19 decades - 23
Carl Ritter von Gheganot measured- - 24
Frederick William, Elector of Hessenot measured- - 25
Ignacy Domeyko18 decades
How to read these rankings
- People sit in their own time. Everyone is placed in the century their working life belongs to, and never in one that came after their death.
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record, read across every language rather than one. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus. Those decades are closed, so each curve is measured once and kept.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, or a name belongs to more than one notable person, we would rather show nothing than guess.