← 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 - 26
Percy Bysshe Shelley21 decades - 27
Arthur Rimbaud14 decades - 28
Emily Dickinson13 decades - 29
Charlotte Brontë17 decades - 30
Henry David Thoreau13 decades - 31
Robert Louis Stevenson15 decades - 32
Walt Whitman17 decades - 33
Mikhail Lermontov15 decades - 34
Guy de Maupassant14 decades - 35
Harriet Tubman9 decades - 36
Charles Baudelaire17 decades - 37
George Eliot19 decades - 38
Gabriele D'Annunzio14 decades - 39
John Keats21 decades - 40
Herman Melville18 decades - 41
William Wordsworth22 decades - 42
Giacomo Leopardi22 decades - 43
Bram Stoker12 decades - 44
Heinrich Heine21 decades - 45
Joseph Conrad14 decades - 46
Henrik Ibsen14 decades - 47
Frederick Douglass18 decades - 48
Walter Scott22 decades - 49
Thomas Hardy18 decades - 50
Louisa May Alcott14 decades - 51
Gustave Flaubert17 decades - 52
Taras Shevchenko13 decades - 53
Anne Brontë1 decades - 54
José Rizal13 decades - 55
Nathaniel Hawthorne19 decades - 56
Henry James18 decades - 57
Stendhal22 decades - 58
Alexis de Tocqueville19 decades - 59
John Ruskin18 decades - 60
Rudolf Steiner14 decades - 61
Alfred Tennyson19 decades - 62
Harriet Beecher Stowe17 decades - 63
Paul Verlaine14 decades - 64
Samuel Taylor Coleridge19 decades - 65
José Martí16 decades - 66
Miguel de Unamuno14 decades - 67
Bertha von Suttner13 decades - 68
Thomas Carlyle20 decades - 69
J. M. Barrie13 decades - 70
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow18 decades - 71
Washington Irving22 decades - 72
Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powellnot measured- - 73
Edith Wharton13 decades - 74
L. Frank Baum8 decades - 75
William Tecumseh Sherman14 decades - 76
Knut Hamsun10 decades - 77
Helena Blavatsky2 decades - 78
Sojourner Truth13 decades - 79
Alfred de Musset19 decades - 80
François-René de Chateaubriand11 decades - 81
Alessandro Manzoni22 decades - 82
E. T. A. Hoffmann21 decades - 83
O. Henry14 decades - 84
Alexandre Dumas filsnot measured- - 85
Ivan Turgenev6 decades - 86
William Makepeace Thackeray17 decades - 87
Anatole France15 decades - 88
Elizabeth Barrett Browning17 decades - 89
Giosuè Carducci17 decades - 90
Nikolay Nekrasov13 decades - 91
Germaine de Staël10 decades - 92
Heinrich von Kleist22 decades - 93
Robert Browning19 decades - 94
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder13 decades - 95
James Fenimore Cooper18 decades - 96
Fyodor Tyutchev11 decades - 97
Alphonse de Lamartine20 decades - 98
Mehmed V0 decades - 99
Dante Gabriel Rossetti15 decades - 100
Gerhart Hauptmann13 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.