← Fame through time1854
1854
Whose working lives fell in 1854. 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 1854, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Queen Victorianot measured- - 2
Walt Whitman17 decades - 3
George Eliot19 decades - 4
Herman Melville18 decades - 5
John Ruskin18 decades - 6
Gustave Courbet16 decades - 7
Clara Schumann18 decades - 8
Albert, Prince Consortnot measured- - 9
Jacques Offenbach16 decades - 10
Theodor Fontane17 decades - 11
Georg V of Hanover15 decades - 12
Gottfried Keller18 decades - 13
Thomas A. Hendricks13 decades - 14
Léon Foucault14 decades - 15
Sir George Stokes, 1st Baronetnot measured- - 16
William A. Wheeler11 decades - 17
Charles Kingsley17 decades - 18
Chlodwig, 3rd Prince of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst10 decades - 19
Julia Ward Howe16 decades - 20
James Russell Lowell18 decades - 21
Allan Pinkerton13 decades - 22
Eunice Newton Foote0 decades - 23
Hippolyte Fizeau0 decades - 24
Franz von Suppé0 decades - 25
Prince George, Duke of Cambridge0 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.