Regarding your post on tea and coffee in Les Mis fics-- are there any other little anachronisms that have stood out to you?
Most of my research for everyday life of the not-heinously-wealthy from that time period tends to be limited to England and the fledgling USA, just because that's most readily available to me, and it didn't occur to me just how big a difference there'd be between the countries.
Tips would be greatly appreciated.
Oh, thank you for asking. Where do I start? First, I don’t want to be overly critical, and as I said, I don’t mind ignoring anachronisms, especially small ones. I’m grateful to all the authors I read and appreciate their efforts!
Second, it’s hard to say which anachronisms are small; once you know, you know.
I rarely see accurate representations of food and drinks, especially those of common people. Take, for example, breakfast. We don’t want any English breakfast—most British traditions were met with hostility in France due to the antagonism between the two nations. Moreover, the notion of breakfast was quite new for the French at that time. Typically, the rich had toasted bread (with butter or jam) and coffee or hot chocolate, while the poor had bread and soup, water, or even wine. Before the Haussmann reconstruction, not every flat had a kitchen. Javert most likely wouldn’t have had one. (I often see fanfics featuring Javert’s kitchen.)
Water, bathing, washing dishes. Many authors don't grasp that obtaining enough water for bathing (not to mention it as a daily practice) was a big deal, making dry washing more common. And then there was the challenge of getting the water out of the house. I’m not sure people understand that the sewer system at that time was designed for draining water and filth from the streets, not from individual houses. Some fancy houses might have had standpipes in the basements, but they still had to remove dirty water manually.
Javert’s work at the police is always tricky. Authors often have him doing things the early nineteenth-century police couldn’t and wasn’t expected to do—no investigative work, and definitely no detective work. But let’s be honest, Hugo also messed this up, as his Javert performed duties as if he were working for all the existing police departments in Paris.
And little things about behaviour—Javert and Valjean wouldn’t cook for each other. Cooking and other household chores associated with women were considered too degrading for any man, even male servants.
Feel free to ask if you have any specific questions.
