← 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 English books during the 1880s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus59 - 2
Augustus10 - 3
Homer10 - 4
Plato9.5 - 5
Cicero8.3 - 6
Aristotle7.9 - 7
Virgil5.7 - 8
Socrates4.9 - 9
Herodotus4.0 - 10
Plutarch3.1 - 11
Charlemagne3.0 - 12
Walter Scott2.8 - 13
Ovid2.6 - 14
Demosthenes2.3 - 15
George Eliot2.3 - 16
Cleopatra2.3 - 17
Euclid2.2 - 18
William Henry2.2 - 19
Origen2.2 - 20
Livy2.1 - 21
Bede2.1 - 22
Xenophon2.0 - 23
James II, Count of Urgell2.0 - 24
Johns Hopkins1.9 - 25
John the Baptist1.9
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 - 26
Georg Cantor14 decades - 27
Arthur Balfour15 decades - 28
Santiago Ramón y Cajal13 decades - 29
Alfonso XII of Spain0 decades - 30
Jesse James14 decades - 31
Raja Ravi Varma0 decades - 32
Chulalongkorn13 decades - 33
Buffalo Bill15 decades - 34
Joseph Pulitzer14 decades - 35
Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria0 decades - 36
Maria Feodorovna17 decades - 37
Viktor Vasnetsov10 decades - 38
August Strindberg8 decades - 39
Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener0 decades - 40
Sofia Kovalevskaya14 decades - 41
Gabriel Fauré14 decades - 42
Sergei Witte9 decades - 43
Paul Ehrlich13 decades - 44
Ned Kelly11 decades - 45
Abay Kunanbaiuly8 decades - 46
Gottlob Frege9 decades - 47
Frances Hodgson Burnett15 decades - 48
Joseph Joffre2 decades - 49
Wyatt Earp10 decades - 50
Amadeo I of Spainnot measured- - 51
Peter Carl Fabergé3 decades - 52
Vilfredo Pareto13 decades - 53
Henri Becquerel15 decades - 54
Hendrik Lorentz0 decades - 55
Pierre Loti14 decades - 56
Otto Lilienthal13 decades - 57
Vladimir Solovyov14 decades - 58
Henryk Sienkiewicz11 decades - 59
Édouard-Henri Avril5 decades - 60
Aleksei Brusilov3 decades - 61
August von Mackensen2 decades - 62
Charles Taze Russell0 decades - 63
Karl Kautsky13 decades - 64
Gustave Caillebotte5 decades - 65
Gojong of Koreanot measured- - 66
Max Liebermann13 decades - 67
Ludwig III of Bavarianot measured- - 68
Auguste Escoffier4 decades - 69
Lafcadio Hearn14 decades - 70
Emil von Behring11 decades - 71
John William Waterhouse0 decades - 72
Helmuth von Moltke the Younger0 decades - 73
Joris-Karl Huysmans11 decades - 74
Vasily Surikov8 decades - 75
Olga Constantinovna of Russia16 decades - 76
Eduard Bernstein13 decades - 77
Anandi Gopal Joshinot measured- - 78
Octave Mirbeau14 decades - 79
Mihai Eminescu5 decades - 80
Calamity Jane11 decades - 81
Hipólito Yrigoyen11 decades - 82
John Philip Sousa13 decades - 83
Victoriano Huerta13 decades - 84
Vladimir Korolenko13 decades - 85
Leoš Janáček0 decades - 86
George Westinghouse15 decades - 87
Oliver Heaviside10 decades - 88
Alexander Ulyanov11 decades - 89
Kate Chopin8 decades - 90
Thomas R. Marshall8 decades - 91
Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay5 decades - 92
Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearnnot measured- - 93
Margaret of Savoy17 decades - 94
Tōgō Heihachirō0 decades - 95
Bernhard von Bülow12 decades - 96
Luigi Cadorna11 decades - 97
Georges Sorel12 decades - 98
Lord Randolph Churchill15 decades - 99
Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Roseberynot measured- - 100
Elihu Root14 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.