← Fame through time1845
1845
Whose working lives fell in 1845. 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 1845, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Frédéric Chopin16 decades - 2
Pope Leo XIII15 decades - 3
P. T. Barnum17 decades - 4
Robert Schumann19 decades - 5
Alfred de Musset19 decades - 6
Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour10 decades - 7
Elizabeth Gaskell7 decades - 8
Nikolai Pirogov15 decades - 9
Margaret Fuller18 decades - 10
Éliphas Lévi6 decades - 11
Ferdinand II of the Two Siciliesnot measured- - 12
Theodor Schwann16 decades - 13
Eliza McCardle Johnson0 decades - 14
Asa Gray19 decades - 15
Howard Staunton4 decades - 16
Alexandre Colonna-Walewski0 decades - 17
Ernst Kummer1 decades - 18
Juan Bautista Alberdi19 decades - 19
William Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrongnot measured- - 20
Akbar Khan18 decades - 21
Karl Richard Lepsius4 decades - 22
Francisco Serrano, 1st Duke of la Torre12 decades - 23
Fritz Reuter17 decades - 24
Sir Henry Rawlinson, 1st Baronetnot measured- - 25
Fanny Elssler19 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.