← Fame through time1840
1840
Whose working lives fell in 1840. 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 1840, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Hans Christian Andersen18 decades - 2
Joseph Smith22 decades - 3
Alexis de Tocqueville19 decades - 4
Giuseppe Mazzini20 decades - 5
Ferdinand de Lesseps18 decades - 6
William Rowan Hamilton16 decades - 7
Princess Sophie of Bavarianot measured- - 8
William Lloyd Garrison19 decades - 9
Fanny Mendelssohn10 decades - 10
Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet0 decades - 11
Mary Seacole2 decades - 12
Robert Fitzroy1 decades - 13
Louis Auguste Blanqui19 decades - 14
Adalbert Stifter19 decades - 15
Franz Xaver Winterhalter3 decades - 16
Marie d'Agoult10 decades - 17
Jean Eugène Robert-Houdinnot measured- - 18
William Harrison Ainsworth7 decades - 19
George Müllernot measured- - 20
Sarah Fuller Flower Adamsnot measured- - 21
Esteban Echeverría Mamani17 decades - 22
Alexander Burnes10 decades - 23
Prosper Guéranger12 decades - 24
Malek Jahan Khanomnot measured- - 25
Shirali Muslumovnot measured-
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.