← 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
Napoleon22 decades - 2
Victor Hugo22 decades - 3
Alexandre Dumasnot measured- - 4
Frédéric Chopin16 decades - 5
Jules Verne16 decades - 6
Claude Monet14 decades - 7
Napoleon III21 decades - 8
Louis Pasteur14 decades - 9
Émile Zola16 decades - 10
George Sand20 decades - 11
Honoré de Balzac17 decades - 12
Sarah Bernhardt15 decades - 13
Arthur Rimbaud14 decades - 14
Giuseppe Garibaldi11 decades - 15
Guy de Maupassant14 decades - 16
Charles Baudelaire17 decades - 17
Paul Gauguin13 decades - 18
Philippe Pétain8 decades - 19
Paul Cézanne12 decades - 20
Claude Debussy12 decades - 21
Heinrich Heine21 decades - 22
Pierre-Auguste Renoir12 decades - 23
Gustave Flaubert17 decades - 24
Pierre Curie13 decades - 25
Louis Philippe I19 decades - 26
Gustave Eiffel10 decades - 27
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec10 decades - 28
Thérèse of Lisieux10 decades - 29
Auguste Rodin14 decades - 30
Stendhal22 decades - 31
Alexis de Tocqueville19 decades - 32
Émile Durkheim11 decades - 33
Édouard Manet15 decades - 34
Georges Clemenceau13 decades - 35
Edgar Degas11 decades - 36
Eugène Delacroix20 decades - 37
Paul Verlaine14 decades - 38
Napoleon IInot measured- - 39
Hector Berlioz19 decades - 40
Auguste Comte22 decades - 41
Henri Bergson12 decades - 42
Henri Poincaré13 decades - 43
Alfred Dreyfus13 decades - 44
Joachim Murat21 decades - 45
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon8 decades - 46
Ferdinand Foch7 decades - 47
Adolphe Thiers15 decades - 48
Alfred de Musset19 decades - 49
François-René de Chateaubriand11 decades - 50
Rudolf Diesel10 decades - 51
Évariste Galois6 decades - 52
Alexandre Dumas filsnot measured- - 53
Jean Jaurès13 decades - 54
Bernadette Soubirous15 decades - 55
Camille Saint-Saëns15 decades - 56
Georges Bizet15 decades - 57
Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma18 decades - 58
Gustave Courbet16 decades - 59
Joseph Bonaparte22 decades - 60
Georges Méliès9 decades - 61
Gustave Doré17 decades - 62
Anatole France15 decades - 63
Pierre de Coubertin14 decades - 64
Camille Pissarro13 decades - 65
Georges Seurat11 decades - 66
Germaine de Staël10 decades - 67
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingresnot measured- - 68
Alphonse de Lamartine20 decades - 69
Louis Bonaparte22 decades - 70
Patrice de MacMahon0 decades - 71
Louis Braille14 decades - 72
Joseph Fourier11 decades - 73
Raymond Poincaré13 decades - 74
Jean-François Champollion6 decades - 75
Jacques Offenbach16 decades - 76
Berthe Morisot13 decades - 77
Henri Rousseau12 decades - 78
Théophile Gautier19 decades - 79
Louise Michel15 decades - 80
Alphonse Daudet16 decades - 81
Michel Ney18 decades - 82
Eugénie de Montijo17 decades - 83
Oscar I of Sweden0 decades - 84
Gabriel Fauré14 decades - 85
Camille Claudel11 decades - 86
André-Marie Ampère15 decades - 87
Prosper Mérimée19 decades - 88
William-Adolphe Bouguereau5 decades - 89
Félix Faure18 decades - 90
Marie Thérèse of Francenot measured- - 91
Nicéphore Niépce6 decades - 92
Sadi Carnotnot measured- - 93
Ernest Renan17 decades - 94
Joseph Joffre2 decades - 95
Aristide Briand12 decades - 96
Stéphane Mallarmé14 decades - 97
Adolphe Sax13 decades - 98
Charles Fourier19 decades - 99
Louis Antoine, Duke of Angoulême2 decades - 100
Vilfredo Pareto13 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.