← Fame through time1700-1799
The 18th century
Whose working lives fell in the 18th century. 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 the 18th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
William Blake22 decades - 2
Mary Wollstonecraft21 decades - 3
Robert Burns22 decades - 4
Samuel Johnson22 decades - 5
Edward Gibbon22 decades - 6
Henry Fielding22 decades - 7
Ann Radcliffe13 decades - 8
James Boswell22 decades - 9
William Cowper22 decades - 10
Joseph Addison22 decades - 11
Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshirenot measured- - 12
Frances Burney13 decades - 13
Samuel Richardson22 decades - 14
Charles Wesley22 decades - 15
John Burgoyne22 decades - 16
James Macpherson22 decades - 17
John Gay22 decades - 18
James Thomson22 decades - 19
Mary Astell8 decades - 20
Iolo Morganwg6 decades - 21
George Crabbe22 decades - 22
William Robertson22 decades - 23
Sarah Trimmer1 decades - 24
Thomas Day22 decades - 25
William Williams Pantycelyn0 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.