← Fame through time1855
1855
Whose working lives fell in 1855. 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 1855, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Florence Nightingale17 decades - 2
Friedrich Engels17 decades - 3
Susan B. Anthony16 decades - 4
William Tecumseh Sherman14 decades - 5
Victor Emmanuel II of Italy12 decades - 6
Herbert Spencer17 decades - 7
Jenny Lind18 decades - 8
Nadarnot measured- - 9
Henri, Count of Chambord0 decades - 10
Afanasy Fet8 decades - 11
Alexandru Ioan Cuza0 decades - 12
John Tyndall17 decades - 13
Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar0 decades - 14
Multatuli9 decades - 15
John Tenniel17 decades - 16
Julia Gardiner Tyler1 decades - 17
Anna Sewell3 decades - 18
Fanny Crosby4 decades - 19
Božena Němcová0 decades - 20
Nana Sahib17 decades - 21
Begum Hazrat Mahal0 decades - 22
Archduchess Adelaide of Austrianot measured- - 23
Sergey Solovyov14 decades - 24
Concepción Arenal Ponte16 decades - 25
William John Macquorn Rankine1 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.