← 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 Chinese books during the 19th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Zhu Xi870 - 2
Li Hongzhang149 - 3
Zhang Zhidong86 - 4
Zuo Zongtang43 - 5
Ban Gu40 - 6
Ge Hong40 - 7Chen Shou14
- 8
Mao Zedong12 - 9
Lu Xun11
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 19th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Napoleon22 decades - 2
Abraham Lincoln22 decades - 3
Karl Marx17 decades - 4
Vincent van Gogh12 decades - 5
Fyodor Dostoevsky17 decades - 6
Nikola Tesla13 decades - 7
Ludwig van Beethoven21 decades - 8
Leo Tolstoy18 decades - 9
Friedrich Nietzsche15 decades - 10
Alexander Pushkin21 decades - 11
Jane Austen19 decades - 12
Sigmund Freud12 decades - 13
Theodore Roosevelt16 decades - 14
Queen Victorianot measured- - 15
Edgar Allan Poe17 decades - 16
Oscar Wilde14 decades - 17
Charles Dickens20 decades - 18
Mark Twain16 decades - 19
Victor Hugo22 decades - 20
Charles Darwin21 decades - 21
Thomas Edison13 decades - 22
Simón Bolívar21 decades - 23
Woodrow Wilson14 decades - 24
Otto von Bismarck16 decades - 25
Ulysses S. Grant16 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.