← Fame through time1880-1889
The 1880s
Whose names filled the books of the 1880s - 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 Chinese books during the 1880s, whenever they lived.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1880s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Vincent van Gogh12 decades - 2
Oscar Wilde14 decades - 3
Thomas Edison13 decades - 4
Alexander Graham Bell15 decades - 5
Arthur Rimbaud14 decades - 6
Antoni Gaudí5 decades - 7
Robert Louis Stevenson15 decades - 8
Guy de Maupassant14 decades - 9
Paul von Hindenburg10 decades - 10
Alexander III of Russia16 decades - 11
Paul Gauguin13 decades - 12
Bram Stoker12 decades - 13
Emperor Meiji11 decades - 14
Ivan Pavlov16 decades - 15
Cecil Rhodes12 decades - 16
Wilhelm Röntgen11 decades - 17
Pope Benedict XV11 decades - 18
José Martí16 decades - 19
Ludwig II of Bavarianot measured- - 20
Billy the Kid12 decades - 21
Henri Poincaré13 decades - 22
H. H. Asquith11 decades - 23
Ferdinand Foch7 decades - 24
Annie Besant15 decades - 25
George I of Greece0 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.