← 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
Rabindranath Tagore11 decades - 2
Swami Vivekananda13 decades - 3
Ramakrishna14 decades - 4
Rani of Jhansi8 decades - 5
William Makepeace Thackeray17 decades - 6
Bahadur Shah Zafar6 decades - 7
Raja Ravi Varma0 decades - 8
Bal Gangadhar Tilak9 decades - 9
Jamsetji Tata0 decades - 10
Ghalib21 decades - 11
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad4 decades - 12
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee4 decades - 13
Syed Ahmad Khan8 decades - 14
Dayananda Saraswati0 decades - 15
Motilal Nehru10 decades - 16
Savitribai Phule0 decades - 17
Dadabhai Naoroji16 decades - 18
Swaminarayan6 decades - 19
Julia Margaret Cameron5 decades - 20
M. Visvesvaraya2 decades - 21
Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar0 decades - 22
Augustus De Morgan11 decades - 23
James Brooke22 decades - 24
Anna Leonowens1 decades - 25
Abdul Karim13 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.