← 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
Abraham Lincoln22 decades - 2
Theodore Roosevelt16 decades - 3
Woodrow Wilson14 decades - 4
Ulysses S. Grant16 decades - 5
James A. Garfield16 decades - 6
Andrew Jackson22 decades - 7
William McKinley16 decades - 8
Grover Cleveland14 decades - 9
John Quincy Adams22 decades - 10
Chester A. Arthur15 decades - 11
William Howard Taft12 decades - 12
William Henry Harrison22 decades - 13
Andrew Johnson22 decades - 14
James Buchanan22 decades - 15
Martin Van Buren21 decades - 16
John Tyler22 decades - 17
Zachary Taylor18 decades - 18
James K. Polk20 decades - 19
Rutherford B. Hayes16 decades - 20
Benjamin Harrison19 decades - 21
Millard Fillmore19 decades - 22
Franklin Pierce20 decades - 23
Joseph Smith22 decades - 24
P. T. Barnum17 decades - 25
Jefferson Davis20 decades - 26
John C. Calhoun22 decades - 27
Brigham Young19 decades - 28
Crazy Horse15 decades - 29
William Randolph Hearst12 decades - 30
Sam Houston20 decades - 31
Davy Crockett19 decades - 32
Joseph Pulitzer14 decades - 33
William H. Seward19 decades - 34
William Jennings Bryan13 decades - 35
Hannibal Hamlin18 decades - 36
Wyatt Earp10 decades - 37
John C. Breckinridge17 decades - 38
Charles Curtis16 decades - 39
Eugene V. Debs13 decades - 40
Henry Clay22 decades - 41
George Brinton McClellan0 decades - 42
William R. King20 decades - 43
Frances Cleveland0 decades - 44
Clarence Darrow12 decades - 45
Schuyler Colfax17 decades - 46
Philip Sheridan13 decades - 47
Victoria Woodhull10 decades - 48
Adlai Stevenson I0 decades - 49
Horace Greeley18 decades - 50
Edith Roosevelt0 decades - 51
Thomas R. Marshall8 decades - 52
Lew Wallace16 decades - 53
Charles Evans Hughes11 decades - 54
Leland Stanford16 decades - 55
James G. Blaine16 decades - 56
Garret Hobart0 decades - 57
Elihu Root14 decades - 58
Winfield Scott21 decades - 59
David Farragut4 decades - 60
James Longstreet15 decades - 61
Horace Mann22 decades - 62
John C. Frémont12 decades - 63
Levi P. Morton11 decades - 64
Richard Mentor Johnson0 decades - 65
Robert Todd Lincoln10 decades - 66
Henry Wilsonnot measured- - 67
Martha Jefferson Randolph1 decades - 68
Charles W. Fairbanks6 decades - 69
Thomas A. Hendricks13 decades - 70
George M. Dallas15 decades - 71
Stephen A. Douglas18 decades - 72
Daniel D. Tompkins18 decades - 73
James S. Sherman4 decades - 74
Red Cloud16 decades - 75
Joseph E. Johnston16 decades - 76
Andrew W. Mellon10 decades - 77
William A. Wheeler11 decades - 78
Julia Grant2 decades - 79
Henry Ward Beecher17 decades - 80
J. E. B. Stuart16 decades - 81
Salmon P. Chase17 decades - 82
Rachel Jackson7 decades - 83
Ellen Axson Wilson2 decades - 84
Alexander H. Stephens18 decades - 85
John Sherman20 decades - 86
Ambrose Burnside3 decades - 87
Julia Gardiner Tyler1 decades - 88
Robert Green Ingersoll0 decades - 89
Edwin Stanton16 decades - 90
Florence Harding0 decades - 91
Ida Saxton McKinley0 decades - 92
John Haynot measured- - 93
Helen Herron Taft0 decades - 94
Frank B. Kellogg10 decades - 95
Joseph Jenkins Roberts0 decades
- 96
Robert M. La Follette12 decades - 97
Rebecca Latimer Felton0 decades - 98
Roger B. Taney19 decades - 99
Carl Schurz16 decades - 100
Rose Cleveland0 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.