← 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
Friedrich Engels17 decades - 2
John Stuart Mill18 decades - 3
Charles Babbage20 decades - 4
Herbert Spencer17 decades - 5
Thomas Robert Malthus8 decades - 6
George Boole9 decades - 7
Francis Galton17 decades - 8
Alfred North Whitehead10 decades - 9
John Herschel0 decades - 10
Alfred Marshallnot measured- - 11
Karl Pearson14 decades - 12
Arthur Evans14 decades - 13
James George Frazer8 decades - 14
Alfred Edward Housman0 decades - 15
William Boothnot measured- - 16
Flinders Petrie14 decades - 17
Halford Mackinder7 decades - 18
Edward Burnett Tylor1 decades - 19
William Stanley Jevons5 decades - 20
Arthur Cayley4 decades - 21
Margaret Murraynot measured- - 22
William Whewell16 decades - 23
John Couch Adams1 decades - 24
Hertha Ayrton0 decades - 25John Nelson Darby2 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.