← Fame through time1847
1847
Whose working lives fell in 1847. 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 1847, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Charles Dickens20 decades - 2
Robert Browning19 decades - 3
Alexander Herzen16 decades - 4
Ivan Goncharov17 decades - 5
Henry Wilsonnot measured- - 6
Louise of Orléansnot measured- - 7
Natalia Pushkina9 decades - 8
Moses Hess10 decades - 9
Alexander H. Stephens18 decades - 10
Abbas I of Egyptnot measured- - 11
Truganini2 decades - 12
Johann Gottfried Galle0 decades - 13
Augustus Puginnot measured- - 14
Théodore Rousseau17 decades - 15
Samuel Smiles17 decades - 16
Empress Amélie of Brazil1 decades - 17
Mirza Fatali Akhundov6 decades - 18
Charles Canning, 1st Earl Canningnot measured- - 19
James Broun-Ramsay, 1st Marquess of Dalhousienot measured- - 20
Zuo Zongtang7 decades - 21
Virginia Eliza Clemm Poenot measured- - 22
Peter Christen Asbjørnsen0 decades - 23
Edward Lear15 decades - 24
Cochise16 decades - 25
Zygmunt Krasiński0 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.