Who Was Alive

Who was alive in 1855?

209 of the people we track were surely alive in 1855. The best known are listed first, with the age each reached that year.

Died in 1855: Carl Friedrich Gauss, Søren Kierkegaard, Charlotte Brontë, Adam Mickiewicz and Nicholas I of Russia.

  1. Karl Marx37
  2. Abraham Lincoln46
  3. Leo Tolstoy27
  4. Charles Darwin46
  5. Victor Hugo53
  6. Vincent van Gogh2
  7. Fyodor Dostoyevsky34
  8. Friedrich Nietzsche11
  9. Thomas Edison8
  10. Mark Twain20
  11. Charles Dickens43
  12. Hans Christian Andersen50
  13. Oscar Wilde1
  14. Otto von Bismarck40
  15. Louis Pasteur33
  16. Richard Wagner42
  17. Carl Friedrich Gauss77 †
  18. Friedrich Engels35
  19. Sarah Bernhardt11
  20. Alfred Nobel22
  21. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky15
  22. Jules Verne27
  23. Michael Faraday64
  24. Giuseppe Verdi42
  25. Charles Baudelaire34
  26. Dmitri Mendeleev21
  27. Arthur Schopenhauer67
  28. Victoria36
  29. Alexandre Dumas53
  30. Søren Kierkegaard42 †
  31. Henrik Ibsen27
  32. Heinrich Heine58
  33. Émile Zola15
  34. James Clerk Maxwell24
  35. Johannes Brahms22
  36. Anatole France11
  37. Alexander Graham Bell8
  38. Octave Mirbeau7
  39. Gustave Flaubert34
  40. Ulysses S. Grant33
  41. Lewis Carroll23
  42. Wilhelm Röntgen10
  43. Ralph Waldo Emerson52
  44. Claude Monet15
  45. Guy de Maupassant5
  46. Robert Louis Stevenson5
  47. Ivan Turgenev37
  48. John Stuart Mill49
  49. Florence Nightingale35
  50. Antonín Dvořák14
  51. Walt Whitman36
  52. James A. Garfield24
  53. Emily Dickinson25
  54. Martin Van Buren73
  55. Grover Cleveland18
  56. Andrew Johnson47
  57. Henry David Thoreau38
  58. James Buchanan64
  59. Arthur Rimbaud1
  60. John Tyler65
  61. Mikhail Bakunin41
  62. William McKinley12
  63. Alexander von Humboldt86
  64. Millard Fillmore55
  65. Franklin Pierce51
  66. Rutherford B. Hayes33
  67. Paul Cézanne16
  68. Henryk Sienkiewicz9
  69. Benjamin Disraeli51
  70. Taras Shevchenko41
  71. George Eliot36
  72. George Sand51
  73. Benjamin Harrison22
  74. Hector Berlioz52
  75. Charlotte Brontë38 †
  76. James Prescott Joule37
  77. Gregor Mendel33
  78. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres75
  79. Auguste Comte57
  80. Paul Gauguin7
  81. Chester A. Arthur26
  82. Giuseppe Garibaldi48
  83. Robert Schumann45
  84. Herman Melville36
  85. Auguste Rodin15
  86. Antoni Gaudí3
  87. Henri Poincaré1
  88. Adam Mickiewicz56 †
  89. Napoleon III47
  90. Franz Liszt44
  91. Theodor Mommsen38
  92. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson23
  93. Robert Koch12
  94. Frédéric Mistral25
  95. William James13
  96. Ivan Pavlov6
  97. Giosuè Carducci20
  98. Sully Prudhomme16
  99. Eugène Delacroix57
  100. Herbert Spencer35
  101. Thomas Carlyle60
  102. Thomas Hardy15
  103. Peter Kropotkin13
  104. Alfred Tennyson46
  105. Harriet Beecher Stowe44
  106. Pius X20
  107. Paul Verlaine11
  108. August Strindberg6
  109. Nathaniel Hawthorne51
  110. John Ruskin36
  111. Hendrik Lorentz2
  112. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow48
  113. Alexis de Tocqueville50
  114. Leo XIII45
  115. Pierre-Auguste Renoir14
  116. Georg Cantor10
  117. Charles Babbage64
  118. Edgar Degas21
  119. Andrew Carnegie20
  120. Ramakrishna19

The 120 best known of 209 are listed.