← 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
Abraham Lincoln22 decades - 3
Karl Marx17 decades - 4
Vincent van Gogh12 decades - 5
Fyodor Dostoevsky17 decades - 6
Nikola Tesla13 decades - 7
Ludwig van Beethoven21 decades - 8
Leo Tolstoy18 decades - 9
Friedrich Nietzsche15 decades - 10
Alexander Pushkin21 decades - 11
Jane Austen19 decades - 12
Sigmund Freud12 decades - 13
Theodore Roosevelt16 decades - 14
Queen Victorianot measured- - 15
Edgar Allan Poe17 decades - 16
Oscar Wilde14 decades - 17
Charles Dickens20 decades - 18
Mark Twain16 decades - 19
Victor Hugo22 decades - 20
Charles Darwin21 decades - 21
Thomas Edison13 decades - 22
Simón Bolívar21 decades - 23
Woodrow Wilson14 decades - 24
Otto von Bismarck16 decades - 25
Ulysses S. Grant16 decades - 26
James A. Garfield16 decades - 27
Andrew Jackson22 decades - 28
Anton Chekhov15 decades - 29Lord Byron22 decades
- 30
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky10 decades - 31
Henry Ford16 decades - 32
Rabindranath Tagore11 decades - 33
Alexandre Dumasnot measured- - 34
Frédéric Chopin16 decades - 35
William McKinley16 decades - 36
Richard Wagner19 decades - 37
Grover Cleveland14 decades - 38
John Quincy Adams22 decades - 39
Hans Christian Andersen18 decades - 40
Jules Verne16 decades - 41
Florence Nightingale17 decades - 42
Arthur Conan Doyle12 decades - 43
Chester A. Arthur15 decades - 44
William Howard Taft12 decades - 45
Claude Monet14 decades - 46
Mary Shelley16 decades - 47
William Henry Harrison22 decades - 48
Arthur Schopenhauer20 decades - 49
Andrew Johnson22 decades - 50
James Buchanan22 decades - 51
Nikolai Gogol19 decades - 52
Napoleon III21 decades - 53
Alexander Graham Bell15 decades - 54
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel21 decades - 55
Louis Pasteur14 decades - 56
Alfred Nobel13 decades - 57
Martin Van Buren21 decades - 58
Ada Lovelace3 decades - 59
John Tyler22 decades - 60
Émile Zola16 decades - 61
Zachary Taylor18 decades - 62
Pope Leo XIII15 decades - 63
Lewis Carroll16 decades - 64
James K. Polk20 decades - 65
Søren Kierkegaard3 decades - 66
George Sand20 decades - 67
George Bernard Shaw13 decades - 68
Emily Brontë14 decades - 69
Rutherford B. Hayes16 decades - 70
Honoré de Balzac17 decades - 71
Edward VII13 decades - 72
Percy Bysshe Shelley21 decades - 73
Sarah Bernhardt15 decades - 74
Arthur Rimbaud14 decades - 75
Carl Friedrich Gauss11 decades - 76
Antoni Gaudí5 decades - 77
Emily Dickinson13 decades - 78
Charlotte Brontë17 decades - 79
Swami Vivekananda13 decades - 80
Alexander I of Russia21 decades - 81
Friedrich Engels17 decades - 82
Benjamin Harrison19 decades - 83
Henry David Thoreau13 decades - 84
Robert Louis Stevenson15 decades - 85
Dmitri Mendeleev11 decades - 86
Giuseppe Garibaldi11 decades - 87
Millard Fillmore19 decades - 88
Wilhelm II, German Emperornot measured- - 89
Franklin Pierce20 decades - 90
Walt Whitman17 decades - 91
Franz Schubert22 decades - 92
Ralph Waldo Emerson19 decades - 93
Alexander II of Russia17 decades - 94
Joseph Smith22 decades - 95
Nicholas I of Russia19 decades - 96
Mikhail Lermontov15 decades - 97
Guy de Maupassant14 decades - 98
John D. Rockefeller14 decades - 99
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austrianot measured- - 100
Harriet Tubman9 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.