← 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
Fyodor Dostoevsky17 decades - 2
Leo Tolstoy18 decades - 3
Alexander Pushkin21 decades - 4
Jane Austen19 decades - 5
Edgar Allan Poe17 decades - 6
Oscar Wilde14 decades - 7
Charles Dickens20 decades - 8
Mark Twain16 decades - 9
Victor Hugo22 decades - 10
Anton Chekhov15 decades - 11
Lord Byron22 decades - 12
Rabindranath Tagore11 decades - 13
Alexandre Dumasnot measured- - 14
Hans Christian Andersen18 decades - 15
Jules Verne16 decades - 16
Florence Nightingale17 decades - 17
Arthur Conan Doyle12 decades - 18
Mary Shelley16 decades - 19
Nikolai Gogol19 decades - 20
Émile Zola16 decades - 21
Lewis Carroll16 decades - 22
George Sand20 decades - 23
George Bernard Shaw13 decades - 24
Emily Brontë14 decades - 25
Honoré de Balzac17 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.