← Fame through time1848
1848
Whose working lives fell in 1848. 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 1848, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Richard Wagner19 decades - 2
Emily Brontë14 decades - 3
Søren Kierkegaard3 decades - 4
Giuseppe Verdi18 decades - 5
David Livingstone17 decades - 6
Claude Bernard21 decades - 7
John Snow21 decades - 8
Stephen A. Douglas18 decades - 9
Henry Ward Beecher17 decades - 10
Friedrich Hebbel18 decades - 11
Branwell Brontë1 decades - 12
Petar II Petrović-Njegoš0 decades - 13
Charles-Valentin Alkan0 decades - 14
Agostino Depretis16 decades - 15
Henry Bessemer4 decades - 16
Juan Pablo Duarte0 decades - 17
Alexander Dargomyzhsky5 decades - 18
Ludwig Leichhardt0 decades - 19
Ivar Aasen0 decades - 20
Nikolay Ogarev11 decades - 21
John C. Frémont12 decades - 22
John Sedgwick15 decades - 23
Franz Miklosich0 decades - 24
Auguste Maquet18 decades - 25
Baron Alexander von Bach0 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.