← Fame through time1863
1863
Whose working lives fell in 1863. 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 1863, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Leo Tolstoy18 decades - 2
Jules Verne16 decades - 3
Henrik Ibsen14 decades - 4
Dante Gabriel Rossetti15 decades - 5
Henry Dunant13 decades - 6
Nikolay Chernyshevsky11 decades - 7
Saigō Takamori0 decades - 8
Charbel Makhlouf0 decades - 9
Hippolyte Taine13 decades - 10
Antonio Cánovas del Castillo17 decades - 11
Shyama Charan Lahiri0 decades - 12
John Langdon Down0 decades - 13
George Meredith17 decades - 14
Cheoljong of Joseonnot measured- - 15
Albert I of Saxonynot measured- - 16
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain0 decades - 17
Joseph Swannot measured- - 18
Alexander Butlerov10 decades - 19
Josephine Butler14 decades - 20
Louise of the Netherlands0 decades - 21
Prince Friedrich Karl of Prussia16 decades - 22
Kamehameha IV11 decades - 23
Robert Gould Shaw12 decades - 24
Effie Gray0 decades - 25
Meyer Guggenheim0 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.