← 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
Edgar Allan Poe17 decades - 2
Mark Twain16 decades - 3
Emily Dickinson13 decades - 4
Henry David Thoreau13 decades - 5
Walt Whitman17 decades - 6
Harriet Tubman9 decades - 7
Herman Melville18 decades - 8
Frederick Douglass18 decades - 9
Louisa May Alcott14 decades - 10
Nathaniel Hawthorne19 decades - 11
Henry James18 decades - 12
Harriet Beecher Stowe17 decades - 13
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow18 decades - 14
Washington Irving22 decades - 15
Edith Wharton13 decades - 16
L. Frank Baum8 decades - 17
William Tecumseh Sherman14 decades - 18
Helena Blavatsky2 decades - 19
Sojourner Truth13 decades - 20
O. Henry14 decades - 21
James Fenimore Cooper18 decades - 22
Buffalo Bill15 decades - 23
Elizabeth Cady Stanton15 decades - 24
Ellen G. White6 decades - 25
Frances Hodgson Burnett15 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.