← 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
Gabriele D'Annunzio14 decades - 2
Giacomo Leopardi22 decades - 3
Alessandro Manzoni22 decades - 4
Giosuè Carducci17 decades - 5
Carlo Collodi8 decades - 6
Emilio Salgari13 decades - 7
Italo Svevo10 decades - 8
Giovanni Pascoli14 decades - 9
Giovanni Verga15 decades - 10
Edmondo De Amicis16 decades - 11
Arrigo Boito16 decades - 12
Antonio Fogazzaro14 decades - 13
Goffredo Mameli18 decades - 14
Bartolo Longo14 decades - 15
Luigi Carlo Farini19 decades - 16
Giuseppe Giacosa15 decades - 17
Giuseppe Gioachino Belli13 decades - 18
Luigi Galleani6 decades - 19
Francesco de Sanctis20 decades - 20
Cesare Cantù20 decades - 21
Giacomo Antonelli19 decades - 22
Pellegrino Artusinot measured- - 23
Luigi Illica14 decades - 24
Graziadio Isaia Ascoli14 decades - 25
Federico de Robertonot measured-
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.