← Fame through time1860-1869
The 1860s
Whose names filled the books of the 1860s - 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 1860s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus89 - 2
Augustus12 - 3
Plato11 - 4
Homer11 - 5
Cicero10 - 6
Aristotle8.7 - 7
Herodotus6.2 - 8
Virgil5.9 - 9
Socrates5.4 - 10
Plutarch4.2 - 11
Charlemagne3.9 - 12
Robert Peel3.4 - 13
Walter Scott3.2 - 14
Strabo2.8 - 15
Demosthenes2.7 - 16
John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford2.7 - 17
Xenophon2.6 - 18
James II, Count of Urgell2.6 - 19
Henry VII, Holy Roman Emperor2.6 - 20
Origen2.6 - 21
Lord Byron2.6 - 22
Ovid2.5 - 23
Livy2.5 - 24
Abraham Lincoln2.5 - 25
Bede2.4
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1860s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Leo Tolstoy18 decades - 2
James A. Garfield16 decades - 3
Jules Verne16 decades - 4
Chester A. Arthur15 decades - 5
Alfred Nobel13 decades - 6
Lewis Carroll16 decades - 7
Emily Dickinson13 decades - 8
Benjamin Harrison19 decades - 9
Dmitri Mendeleev11 decades - 10
Franz Joseph I of Austria18 decades - 11
Johannes Brahms17 decades - 12
James Clerk Maxwell14 decades - 13
Henrik Ibsen14 decades - 14
Sitting Bull15 decades - 15
Louisa May Alcott14 decades - 16
Gustave Eiffel10 decades - 17
Édouard Manet15 decades - 18
Porfirio Díaz16 decades - 19
Edgar Degas11 decades - 20
Frederick III, German Emperornot measured- - 21
Johann Strauss II16 decades - 22
Geronimonot measured- - 23
Isabella II of Spain11 decades - 24
Maximilian I of Mexiconot measured- - 25
William Morris19 decades - 26
Helena Blavatsky2 decades - 27
John Wilkes Booth16 decades - 28
Pedro II of Brazil0 decades - 29
Gustave Doré17 decades - 30
Camille Pissarro13 decades - 31
Bernhard Riemann12 decades - 32
Dante Gabriel Rossetti15 decades - 33
Alexander Borodin8 decades - 34
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin10 decades - 35
Louise Michel15 decades - 36
Ernst Haeckel16 decades - 37
Levi Strauss11 decades - 38
Carlo Collodi8 decades - 39
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisburynot measured- - 40
Thomas Henry Huxley16 decades - 41
Henry Dunant13 decades - 42
Eugénie de Montijo17 decades - 43
Nikolay Chernyshevsky11 decades - 44
William-Adolphe Bouguereau5 decades - 45
Joseph Lister18 decades - 46
Paul Kruger14 decades - 47
Ellen G. White6 decades - 48
Charles Spurgeon6 decades - 49
Wilhelm Wundt15 decades - 50
Naser al-Din Shah Qajarnot measured- - 51
Ivan Shishkin9 decades - 52
Saigō Takamori0 decades - 53
Gottlieb Daimler11 decades - 54
Christina Rossetti16 decades - 55
Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi4 decades - 56
Ferdinand Lassalle16 decades - 57
Jean-Martin Charcot4 decades - 58
John Everett Millais13 decades - 59
Nikolai Leskov13 decades - 60
John Stith Pembertonnot measured- - 61
Wilhelm Busch15 decades - 62
George Brinton McClellan0 decades - 63
Emperor Kōmei0 decades - 64
Charles George Gordon5 decades - 65
Eadweard Muybridge7 decades - 66
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvinnot measured- - 67
Oscar II of Sweden0 decades - 68
Frédéric Mistral17 decades - 69
Xianfeng Emperor0 decades - 70
Johanna Spyri11 decades
- 71
Philip Sheridan13 decades - 72
Jules Ferry16 decades - 73
Anton Rubinstein15 decades - 74
Lucretia Garfield0 decades - 75
Sakamoto Ryōma0 decades - 76
Arnold Böcklin14 decades - 77
Archduke Karl Ludwig of Austria16 decades - 78
Charbel Makhlouf0 decades - 79
Francisco Solano López18 decades - 80
Gustave Moreau16 decades - 81
Savitribai Phule0 decades - 82
Lew Wallace16 decades - 83
James G. Blaine16 decades - 84
José Echegaray19 decades - 85
Dadabhai Naoroji16 decades - 86
Leo von Caprivi5 decades - 87
Élisée Reclus16 decades - 88
Hippolyte Taine13 decades - 89
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Actonnot measured- - 90
August Kekulé4 decades - 91
Wilhelm Liebknecht13 decades - 92
Stephen Foster18 decades - 93
Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich of Russia20 decades - 94
Isma'il Pasha15 decades - 95
Vasily Perov8 decades - 96
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach14 decades - 97
Charles XV of Sweden0 decades - 98
Alfred von Schlieffen0 decades - 99
Richard Dedekind8 decades - 100
William Holman Hunt5 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.