Who Was Alive

Who was alive in 1853?

207 of the people we track were surely alive in 1853. The best known are listed first, with the age each reached that year.

Born in 1853: Vincent van Gogh, Hendrik Lorentz, José Martí, Cecil John Rhodes, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and Wilhelm Ostwald.

  1. Karl Marx35
  2. Abraham Lincoln44
  3. Leo Tolstoy25
  4. Charles Darwin44
  5. Victor Hugo51
  6. Vincent van Goghborn
  7. Fyodor Dostoyevsky32
  8. Friedrich Nietzsche9
  9. Thomas Edison6
  10. Mark Twain18
  11. Charles Dickens41
  12. Hans Christian Andersen48
  13. Otto von Bismarck38
  14. Louis Pasteur31
  15. Richard Wagner40
  16. Carl Friedrich Gauss76
  17. Friedrich Engels33
  18. Sarah Bernhardt9
  19. Alfred Nobel20
  20. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky13
  21. Jules Verne25
  22. Michael Faraday62
  23. Giuseppe Verdi40
  24. Charles Baudelaire32
  25. Dmitri Mendeleev19
  26. Arthur Schopenhauer65
  27. Victoria34
  28. Alexandre Dumas51
  29. Søren Kierkegaard40
  30. Henrik Ibsen25
  31. Heinrich Heine56
  32. Émile Zola13
  33. James Clerk Maxwell22
  34. Johannes Brahms20
  35. Anatole France9
  36. Alexander Graham Bell6
  37. Octave Mirbeau5
  38. Gustave Flaubert32
  39. Ulysses S. Grant31
  40. Lewis Carroll21
  41. Wilhelm Röntgen8
  42. Ralph Waldo Emerson50
  43. Claude Monet13
  44. Guy de Maupassant3
  45. Robert Louis Stevenson3
  46. Ivan Turgenev35
  47. John Stuart Mill47
  48. Florence Nightingale33
  49. Antonín Dvořák12
  50. Walt Whitman34
  51. James A. Garfield22
  52. Emily Dickinson23
  53. Martin Van Buren71
  54. Grover Cleveland16
  55. Andrew Johnson45
  56. Henry David Thoreau36
  57. James Buchanan62
  58. John Tyler63
  59. Mikhail Bakunin39
  60. William McKinley10
  61. Alexander von Humboldt84
  62. Millard Fillmore53
  63. Franklin Pierce49
  64. Rutherford B. Hayes31
  65. Paul Cézanne14
  66. Henryk Sienkiewicz7
  67. Benjamin Disraeli49
  68. Taras Shevchenko39
  69. George Eliot34
  70. George Sand49
  71. Benjamin Harrison20
  72. Hector Berlioz50
  73. Charlotte Brontë37
  74. James Prescott Joule35
  75. Gregor Mendel31
  76. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres73
  77. Auguste Comte55
  78. Paul Gauguin5
  79. Chester A. Arthur24
  80. Giuseppe Garibaldi46
  81. Robert Schumann43
  82. Herman Melville34
  83. Auguste Rodin13
  84. Antoni Gaudí1
  85. Adam Mickiewicz55
  86. Napoleon III45
  87. Franz Liszt42
  88. Theodor Mommsen36
  89. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson21
  90. Robert Koch10
  91. Frédéric Mistral23
  92. William James11
  93. Ivan Pavlov4
  94. Giosuè Carducci18
  95. Sully Prudhomme14
  96. Eugène Delacroix55
  97. Herbert Spencer33
  98. Thomas Carlyle58
  99. Thomas Hardy13
  100. Peter Kropotkin11
  101. Alfred Tennyson44
  102. Harriet Beecher Stowe42
  103. Pius X18
  104. Paul Verlaine9
  105. August Strindberg4
  106. Nathaniel Hawthorne49
  107. John Ruskin34
  108. Hendrik Lorentzborn
  109. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow46
  110. Alexis de Tocqueville48
  111. Leo XIII43
  112. Pierre-Auguste Renoir12
  113. Georg Cantor8
  114. Charles Babbage62
  115. Edgar Degas19
  116. Andrew Carnegie18
  117. Ramakrishna17
  118. Édouard Manet21
  119. Louisa May Alcott21
  120. Carl Benz9

The 120 best known of 207 are listed.