← Fame through time1861
1861
Whose working lives fell in 1861. 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 1861, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Bernhard Riemann12 decades - 2
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin10 decades - 3
Carlo Collodi8 decades - 4
Eugénie de Montijo17 decades - 5
George Brinton McClellan0 decades - 6
Xianfeng Emperor0 decades - 7
Gustave Moreau16 decades - 8
Francisco Solano López18 decades - 9
Wilhelm Liebknecht13 decades - 10
Stephen Foster18 decades - 11
Charles XV of Sweden0 decades - 12
Julia Grant2 decades - 13
Frederic Edwin Church3 decades - 14
Nikolay Dobrolyubov14 decades - 15
Pedro V of Portugal0 decades - 16
Alexander Afanasyev5 decades - 17
Walter Bagehot16 decades - 18
Matilda Joslyn Gage5 decades - 19
Friedrich I, Grand Duke of Badennot measured- - 20
Cetshwayo kaMpande0 decades - 21
Henry Graynot measured- - 22
Giuseppe Zanardelli16 decades - 23
Stanislao Cannizzaro16 decades - 24
Ippolito Nievo17 decades - 25
Ludwig Minkus0 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.