← 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 - 26
William Jamesnot measured- - 27
Georges Clemenceau13 decades - 28
Paul Verlaine14 decades - 29
Robert Koch14 decades - 30
Bertha von Suttner13 decades - 31
Ilya Repin10 decades - 32
Edvard Grieg12 decades - 33
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov9 decades - 34
Umberto I of Italy14 decades - 35
Alexandra of Denmark2 decades - 36
Modest Mussorgsky11 decades - 37
Ambrose Bierce13 decades - 38
Bernadette Soubirous15 decades - 39
Camille Saint-Saëns15 decades - 40
Georges Bizet15 decades - 41
George Armstrong Custer7 decades - 42
Liliʻuokalaninot measured- - 43
Anatole France15 decades - 44
Giosuè Carducci17 decades - 45
Crazy Horse15 decades - 46
Ludwig Boltzmann15 decades - 47
Alois Hitler8 decades - 48
Henry Morton Stanley7 decades - 49
Mehmed V0 decades - 50
Karl May14 decades - 51
John Muir19 decades - 52
Mary Cassatt12 decades - 53
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer13 decades - 54
Berthe Morisot13 decades - 55
Henri Rousseau12 decades - 56
Victoria, Princess Royalnot measured- - 57
Alphonse Daudet16 decades - 58
Jamsetji Tata0 decades - 59
Benito Pérez Galdós14 decades - 60
Karl Benz11 decades - 61
Itō Hirobumi0 decades - 62
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad4 decades - 63
Félix Faure18 decades - 64
Frederick VIII of Denmark0 decades - 65
Princess Alice of the United Kingdomnot measured- - 66
Sadi Carnotnot measured- - 67
Charles Sanders Peirce9 decades - 68
Henry George19 decades - 69
Stéphane Mallarmé14 decades - 70
Menelik II14 decades - 71
Murad V0 decades - 72
Cesare Lombroso16 decades - 73
Ernst Mach16 decades - 74
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch5 decades - 75
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee4 decades - 76
Giovanni Giolitti14 decades - 77
Arkhip Kuindzhi2 decades - 78
Paul Morphy7 decades - 79
Carol I of Romanianot measured- - 80
August Bebel14 decades - 81
Vasily Vereshchagin8 decades - 82
Louis Riel15 decades - 83
Tongzhi Emperornot measured- - 84
Giovanni Verga15 decades - 85
Gustave Le Bon15 decades - 86
Léon Gambetta15 decades - 87
Rosalía de Castro13 decades - 88
Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gothanot measured- - 89
Wilhelm Steinitz0 decades - 90
Odilon Redon14 decades - 91
Peter I of Serbia0 decades - 92
Nikolay Przhevalsky9 decades - 93
Alfred Sisley9 decades - 94
Tokugawa Yoshinobu0 decades - 95
Victoria Woodhull10 decades - 96
Muhammad Ahmad ibn ʿAbdallahnot measured- - 97
Adlai Stevenson I0 decades - 98
Ferdinand von Zeppelin5 decades - 99
Father Damien12 decades - 100
Wilfrid Laurier13 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.