← Fame through time1856
1856
Whose working lives fell in 1856. 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 1856, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Fyodor Dostoevsky17 decades - 2
Charles Baudelaire17 decades - 3
Harriet Tubman9 decades - 4
Gustave Flaubert17 decades - 5
Nikolay Nekrasov13 decades - 6
Richard Francis Burton2 decades - 7
Rudolf Virchow16 decades - 8
Hermann von Helmholtz14 decades - 9
Elizabeth Blackwell17 decades - 10
Mary Baker Eddy13 decades - 11
Lola Montez18 decades - 12
Bartolomé Mitre20 decades - 13
Nathan Bedford Forrest10 decades - 14
Pafnuty Chebyshev4 decades - 15
Luitpold, Prince Regent of Bavaria19 decades - 16
Louis Vuitton4 decades - 17
John Abbottnot measured- - 18
Arthur Cayley4 decades - 19
Dalai Lama 11 Khedrub Gyatsonot measured- - 20
Charles Tupper15 decades - 21
Ford Madox Brown15 decades - 22
Henri-Frédéric Amiel10 decades - 23
Pauline Viardot18 decades - 24
Gabriel García Morenonot measured- - 25
Apollon Maykov16 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.