← 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
J. M. W. Turner22 decades - 2
William Morris19 decades - 3
Victoria, Princess Royalnot measured- - 4
Joseph Merrick0 decades - 5
John Constable22 decades - 6
John Everett Millais13 decades - 7
Eadweard Muybridge7 decades - 8
Aubrey Beardsley13 decades - 9
Edward Lear15 decades - 10
William Holman Hunt5 decades - 11
Edward Burne-Jones13 decades - 12
Frederic Leighton5 decades - 13
Branwell Brontë1 decades - 14
John Martin22 decades - 15
Louis Wain2 decades - 16
Ford Madox Brown15 decades - 17
Gertrude Jekyll9 decades - 18
Walter Sickert12 decades - 19
John Collier17 decades - 20
George Cruikshank21 decades - 21
Effie Gray0 decades - 22
Princess Elizabeth of the United Kingdomnot measured- - 23
John Atkinson Grimshaw0 decades - 24
William Kennedy Dickson0 decades - 25
Elizabeth Thompson18 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.