← Fame through time1870-1879
The 1870s
Whose names filled the books of the 1870s - 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 1870s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus72 - 2
Augustus12 - 3
Homer11 - 4
Plato11 - 5
Cicero9.7 - 6
Aristotle8.7 - 7
Socrates6.6 - 8
Virgil6.5 - 9
Herodotus5.0 - 10
Plutarch3.5 - 11
Charlemagne3.3 - 12
Walter Scott3.2 - 13
Ovid2.9 - 14
Livy2.8 - 15
Strabo2.7 - 16
Demosthenes2.5 - 17
Origen2.5 - 18
Cleopatra2.4 - 19
Xenophon2.3 - 20
John the Baptist2.2 - 21
Tertullian2.2 - 22
Bede2.2 - 23
Euclid2.2 - 24
James II, Count of Urgell2.2 - 25
Robert Peel2.2
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1870s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Friedrich Nietzsche15 decades - 2
Mark Twain16 decades - 3
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky10 decades - 4
William McKinley16 decades - 5
Grover Cleveland14 decades - 6
Claude Monet14 decades - 7
Émile Zola16 decades - 8
Edward VII13 decades - 9
Sarah Bernhardt15 decades - 10
John D. Rockefeller14 decades - 11
Andrew Carnegie14 decades - 12
Leopold II of Belgium9 decades - 13
Paul Cézanne12 decades - 14
Pope Pius X12 decades - 15
Antonín Dvořák0 decades - 16
Empress Elisabeth of Austria0 decades - 17
Empress Dowager Cixi5 decades - 18
Pierre-Auguste Renoir12 decades - 19
Thomas Hardy18 decades - 20
Abdul Hamid II13 decades - 21
J. P. Morgan16 decades - 22
Auguste Rodin14 decades - 23
Henry James18 decades - 24
Ramakrishna14 decades - 25
Peter Kropotkin11 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.