← Fame through time1850-1859
The 1850s
Whose names filled the books of the 1850s - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.
Talked about then
Whose names appeared most in English books during the 1850s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus93 - 2
Homer14 - 3
Augustus13 - 4
Cicero12 - 5
Plato11 - 6
Aristotle9.5 - 7
Herodotus7.6 - 8
Virgil7.2 - 9
Socrates6.5 - 10
John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford5.5 - 11
Plutarch5.3 - 12
Robert Peel4.9 - 13
Demosthenes4.4 - 14
Charlemagne4.4 - 15
Livy4.1 - 16
Strabo4.1 - 17
Walter Scott3.6 - 18
Origen3.5 - 19
Xenophon3.5 - 20
Ovid3.2 - 21
Lord Byron3.1 - 22
Tertullian3.0 - 23
Otho2.9 - 24
James II, Count of Urgell2.8 - 25
Cleopatra2.6
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1850s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Karl Marx17 decades - 2
Fyodor Dostoevsky17 decades - 3
Queen Victorianot measured- - 4
Otto von Bismarck16 decades - 5
Ulysses S. Grant16 decades - 6
Florence Nightingale17 decades - 7
Louis Pasteur14 decades - 8
Ada Lovelace3 decades - 9
Rutherford B. Hayes16 decades - 10
Charlotte Brontë17 decades - 11
Friedrich Engels17 decades - 12
Henry David Thoreau13 decades - 13
Walt Whitman17 decades - 14
Alexander II of Russia17 decades - 15
Harriet Tubman9 decades - 16
Charles Baudelaire17 decades - 17
George Eliot19 decades - 18
Herman Melville18 decades - 19
Frederick Douglass18 decades - 20
Gregor Mendel12 decades - 21
Gustave Flaubert17 decades - 22
John Ruskin18 decades - 23
Susan B. Anthony16 decades - 24
Rani of Jhansi8 decades - 25
William Tecumseh Sherman14 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. 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.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.