← 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
Edgar Allan Poe17 decades - 2
Mark Twain16 decades - 3
Emily Dickinson13 decades - 4
Henry David Thoreau13 decades - 5
Walt Whitman17 decades - 6
Harriet Tubman9 decades - 7
Herman Melville18 decades - 8
Frederick Douglass18 decades - 9
Louisa May Alcott14 decades - 10
Nathaniel Hawthorne19 decades - 11
Henry James18 decades - 12
Harriet Beecher Stowe17 decades - 13
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow18 decades - 14
Washington Irving22 decades - 15
Edith Wharton13 decades - 16
L. Frank Baum8 decades - 17
William Tecumseh Sherman14 decades - 18
Helena Blavatsky2 decades - 19
Sojourner Truth13 decades - 20
O. Henry14 decades - 21
James Fenimore Cooper18 decades - 22
Buffalo Bill15 decades - 23
Elizabeth Cady Stanton15 decades - 24
Ellen G. White6 decades - 25
Frances Hodgson Burnett15 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.