← 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 - 26
Ignaz Semmelweis6 decades - 27
John Bosco16 decades - 28
Alexandre Dumas filsnot measured- - 29
Victor Emmanuel II of Italy12 decades - 30
Ivan Turgenev6 decades - 31
Ivan Aivazovsky2 decades - 32
Gustave Courbet16 decades - 33
Herbert Spencer17 decades - 34
Clara Schumann18 decades - 35
Nikolay Nekrasov13 decades - 36
Albert, Prince Consortnot measured- - 37
Stonewall Jackson16 decades - 38
Mary Todd Lincoln10 decades - 39
Alfred Russel Wallace15 decades - 40
Christian IX of Denmark16 decades - 41
Anton Bruckner14 decades - 42
Heinrich Schliemann15 decades - 43
Bedřich Smetana0 decades - 44
George Boole9 decades - 45
Jenny Lind18 decades - 46
Jacques Offenbach16 decades - 47
Francis Galton17 decades - 48
Theodor Fontane17 decades - 49
John A. Macdonald16 decades - 50
Báb12 decades - 51
Richard Francis Burton2 decades - 52
Alexander Ostrovsky18 decades - 53
Elizabeth Cady Stanton15 decades - 54
Otto of Greece0 decades - 55
Ernest Renan17 decades - 56
Rudolf Virchow16 decades - 57
Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy16 decades - 58
William III of the Netherlands0 decades - 59
John C. Breckinridge17 decades - 60
Hermann von Helmholtz14 decades - 61
Wilkie Collins17 decades - 62
Theodor Mommsen18 decades - 63
Abdulmejid I0 decades - 64
Clara Barton15 decades - 65
Werner von Siemens13 decades - 66
Matthew Arnold17 decades - 67
Anthony Trollope17 decades - 68
Syed Ahmad Khan8 decades - 69
Nadarnot measured- - 70
Jean-Léon Gérôme4 decades - 71
Phineas Gage2 decades - 72
Dayananda Saraswati0 decades - 73
Rosa Bonheur18 decades - 74
Elizabeth Blackwell17 decades - 75
James Prescott Joule3 decades - 76
Arthur de Gobineau12 decades - 77
Charles Gounod17 decades - 78
Mary Baker Eddy13 decades - 79
Henri, Count of Chambord0 decades - 80
Max Müller5 decades - 81
Li Hongzhang10 decades - 82
Gustav Kirchhoff4 decades - 83
Schuyler Colfax17 decades - 84
Lola Montez18 decades - 85
Theodor Storm17 decades - 86
Maria II of Portugal0 decades - 87
Karl Weierstrass8 decades - 88
George MacDonald16 decades - 89
Afanasy Fet8 decades - 90
Georg V of Hanover15 decades - 91
Nathan Bedford Forrest10 decades - 92
Leland Stanford16 decades - 93
Bartolomé Mitre20 decades - 94
George Meade13 decades - 95
César Franck15 decades - 96
Francesco Crispi18 decades - 97
Gottfried Keller18 decades - 98
James Longstreet15 decades - 99
Carl Zeiss13 decades - 100
Francisco de Asís, Duke of Cádiz5 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.