← 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
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe14 decades - 2
Voltaire22 decades - 3
William Blake22 decades - 4
Friedrich Schiller22 decades - 5
Mary Wollstonecraft21 decades - 6
Robert Burns22 decades - 7
Samuel Johnson22 decades - 8
Jonathan Swift22 decades - 9
Giacomo Casanova20 decades - 10
Olympe de Gouges22 decades - 11
Alexander Pope22 decades - 12
Guru Gobind Singh9 decades - 13
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing22 decades - 14
Edward Gibbon22 decades - 15
Baron Munchausen0 decades - 16
Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeaunot measured- - 17
Pierre Beaumarchaisnot measured- - 18
Marie Leszczyńska13 decades - 19
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffonnot measured- - 20
Carlo Goldoni22 decades - 21
Ahmed III3 decades - 22
Phillis Wheatley16 decades - 23
Henry Fielding22 decades - 24
Gavrila Derzhavin17 decades - 25
Horace Walpole22 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.