← Fame through time1852
1852
Whose working lives fell in 1852. 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 1852, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Henry David Thoreau13 decades - 2
Ivan Aivazovsky2 decades - 3
Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy16 decades - 4
William III of the Netherlands0 decades - 5
Theodor Mommsen18 decades - 6
Theodor Storm17 decades - 7
Bahá'u'lláh7 decades - 8
Louise of Hesse-Kassel0 decades - 9
Adolphe, Grand Duke of Luxembourgnot measured- - 10
Braxton Bragg16 decades - 11
José Zorrilla21 decades - 12
Joseph Dalton Hooker9 decades - 13
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinvillenot measured- - 14
Debendranath Tagore0 decades - 15
Charles-François Daubigny1 decades - 16
Mykola Kostomarov10 decades - 17
Austen Henry Layard3 decades - 18
George Frederic Watts0 decades - 19
Georg Herwegh18 decades - 20
János Arany0 decades - 21
Gotthold Eisenstein0 decades - 22
Clémentine of Orléans, Princess of Koháry1 decades - 23
Hermann Lotze18 decades - 24
George Henry Lewes16 decades - 25
Pierre Larousse16 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.