← Fame through time1800-1899
The 19th century
Whose names filled the books of the 19th century - 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 19th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus94 - 2
Homer15 - 3
Cicero13 - 4
Augustus13 - 5
Plato10 - 6
Virgil9.6 - 7
Aristotle9.4 - 8
Socrates6.4 - 9
Herodotus6.2 - 10
Plutarch5.6 - 11
Ovid4.2 - 12
Strabo4.1 - 13
Charlemagne3.9 - 14
Demosthenes3.8 - 15
Lord Byron3.6 - 16
Livy3.4 - 17
Origen3.1 - 18
Cleopatra3.0 - 19
Xenophon3.0 - 20
Walter Scott3.0 - 21
Tertullian2.7 - 22
James II, Count of Urgell2.6 - 23
Robert Peel2.6 - 24
Henry VII, Holy Roman Emperor2.6 - 25
Pericles2.5
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 19th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Abraham Lincoln22 decades - 2
Theodore Roosevelt16 decades - 3
Edgar Allan Poe17 decades - 4
Mark Twain16 decades - 5
Thomas Edison13 decades - 6
Woodrow Wilson14 decades - 7
Ulysses S. Grant16 decades - 8
James A. Garfield16 decades - 9
Andrew Jackson22 decades - 10
Henry Ford16 decades - 11
William McKinley16 decades - 12
Grover Cleveland14 decades - 13
John Quincy Adams22 decades - 14
Chester A. Arthur15 decades - 15
William Howard Taft12 decades - 16
William Henry Harrison22 decades - 17
Andrew Johnson22 decades - 18
James Buchanan22 decades - 19
Alexander Graham Bell15 decades - 20
Martin Van Buren21 decades - 21
John Tyler22 decades - 22
Zachary Taylor18 decades - 23
James K. Polk20 decades - 24
Rutherford B. Hayes16 decades - 25
Emily Dickinson13 decades - 26
Benjamin Harrison19 decades - 27
Henry David Thoreau13 decades - 28
Millard Fillmore19 decades - 29
Franklin Pierce20 decades - 30
Walt Whitman17 decades - 31
Ralph Waldo Emerson19 decades - 32
Joseph Smith22 decades - 33
John D. Rockefeller14 decades - 34
Harriet Tubman9 decades - 35
Andrew Carnegie14 decades - 36
Robert E. Lee16 decades - 37
Herman Melville18 decades - 38
Frederick Douglass18 decades - 39
P. T. Barnum17 decades - 40
Sitting Bull15 decades - 41
Jefferson Davis20 decades - 42
Louisa May Alcott14 decades - 43
Nathaniel Hawthorne19 decades - 44
J. P. Morgan16 decades - 45
Henry James18 decades - 46
William Jamesnot measured- - 47
John Dewey14 decades
- 48
Susan B. Anthony16 decades - 49
Harriet Beecher Stowe17 decades - 50
Billy the Kid12 decades - 51
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow18 decades - 52
Geronimonot measured- - 53
Washington Irving22 decades - 54
John Brownnot measured- - 55
Edith Wharton13 decades - 56
L. Frank Baum8 decades - 57
William Tecumseh Sherman14 decades - 58
Helena Blavatsky2 decades - 59
John C. Calhoun22 decades - 60
John Wilkes Booth16 decades - 61
Sojourner Truth13 decades - 62
George Washington Carver9 decades - 63
O. Henry14 decades - 64
Ambrose Bierce13 decades - 65
Brigham Young19 decades - 66
George Armstrong Custer7 decades - 67
Liliʻuokalaninot measured- - 68
Nellie Bly13 decades - 69
Booker T. Washington13 decades - 70
Crazy Horse15 decades - 71
Samuel Morse0 decades - 72
William Randolph Hearst12 decades - 73
Jesse James14 decades - 74
Stonewall Jackson16 decades - 75
John Singer Sargent11 decades - 76
James Fenimore Cooper18 decades - 77
Mary Todd Lincoln10 decades - 78
John J. Pershing12 decades - 79
Sam Houston20 decades - 80
Jane Addams14 decades - 81
John Muir19 decades - 82
Mary Cassatt12 decades - 83
Davy Crockett19 decades - 84
Buffalo Bill15 decades - 85
Joseph Pulitzer14 decades - 86
Cornelius Vanderbilt18 decades - 87
Levi Strauss11 decades - 88
William H. Seward19 decades - 89
Sacagawea9 decades - 90
Kamehameha I13 decades - 91
Elizabeth Cady Stanton15 decades - 92
William Jennings Bryan13 decades - 93
Ellen G. White6 decades - 94
John James Audubon19 decades - 95
Tecumsehnot measured- - 96
Hannibal Hamlin18 decades - 97
Frances Hodgson Burnett15 decades - 98
Wyatt Earp10 decades - 99
Charles Sanders Peirce9 decades - 100
Henry George19 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.