← 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 English books during the 19th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus94 - 2
Homer15 - 3
Cicero13 - 4
Augustus13 - 5
Plato10 - 6
Virgil9.6 - 7
Aristotle9.4 - 8
Socrates6.4 - 9
Herodotus6.2 - 10
Plutarch5.6 - 11
Ovid4.2 - 12
Strabo4.1 - 13
Charlemagne3.9 - 14
Demosthenes3.8 - 15
Lord Byron3.6 - 16
Livy3.4 - 17
Origen3.1 - 18
Cleopatra3.0 - 19
Xenophon3.0 - 20
Walter Scott3.0 - 21
Tertullian2.7 - 22
James II, Count of Urgell2.6 - 23
Robert Peel2.6 - 24
Henry VII, Holy Roman Emperor2.6 - 25
Pericles2.5
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 19th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Frédéric Chopin16 decades - 2
Claude Debussy12 decades - 3
Hector Berlioz19 decades - 4
Camille Saint-Saëns15 decades - 5
Georges Bizet15 decades - 6
Jacques Offenbach16 decades - 7
Gabriel Fauré14 decades - 8
Adolphe Sax13 decades - 9
Charles Gounod17 decades - 10
Hortense de Beauharnais20 decades - 11
Jules Massenet14 decades - 12
César Franck15 decades - 13
Léo Delibes16 decades - 14
Adolphe Adam19 decades - 15
Charles-Valentin Alkan0 decades - 16
Charles-Marie Widor8 decades - 17
Pauline Viardot18 decades - 18
Daniel Auber0 decades - 19
Édouard Lalo1 decades - 20
Vincent d'Indy14 decades - 21
Cécile Chaminade1 decades - 22
Emmanuel Chabrier14 decades - 23
Ernest Chausson13 decades - 24
Maria Malibran7 decades - 25
Mélanie Bonis1 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.