← 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
Theodor Herzl13 decades - 2
Ambrose Bierce13 decades - 3
Nellie Bly13 decades - 4
Henry Morton Stanley7 decades - 5
Ida B. Wells6 decades - 6
Henry Adams19 decades - 7
William Lloyd Garrison19 decades - 8
Wilhelm Liebknecht13 decades - 9
Frederick Law Olmsted16 decades - 10
Melvil Dewey15 decades - 11
Carrie Chapman Catt12 decades - 12
Ida Tarbell12 decades - 13
Walter Bagehot16 decades - 14
Lucy Stone17 decades - 15
William Thomas Stead0 decades - 16
Matilda Joslyn Gage5 decades - 17
Jules Vallès16 decades - 18
Nicolás Avellaneda17 decades - 19
Matilde Serao15 decades - 20
Isabella Beeton0 decades - 21
Benjamin Tuckernot measured- - 22
Ernesto Teodoro Moneta11 decades - 23
Dmitry Pisarev10 decades - 24
Andrew Barton Paterson0 decades - 25
Jules Guesde14 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.