Have you checked the 1880 Baedeker Guide to Southern Germany and Austria, including Hungary and Transylvania? It seems to have a section on Prague (start of Route 41, "Bohemia"), including restaurants, hotels, and points of interest. It could help you figure out which areas were "poshest."
No idea where exactly, but that time it was usual for quite a lot of students to find regular appartments or rooms - a widow usually or an elderly miss owned a house or too big an appartment and used to rent a room. It wouldn't be impossible for a young maid to rent one, either - even better if the widow is actually living there and renting only one of her rooms - not necessarilly and not usually the best one, of course. I'd go for further information into the contemporary writers. Maybe Jirásek, Filozofská historie - it's a story from exactly the time you need and the students are living in a rent as above, and Jirásek is very, very accurate in his details.
A side note: Please, definitely not JosefHof. No H there. It means roughly "Joseph's town part / village" and the Czech form of Joseph is Jozef - no H. (The S in Josefov is right - too difficult do explain where the orthography has changed in s/z during the last 50 years or so, and where it hasn't. :-) ) (Czech native speaker here.)
*smacks head* I'm really not sure why I didn't think of that. Especially when Count of Monte Cristo was my 'go to' quick reference for fancy bits of Paris in a different story.
So were apartments mostly for student living? If character two was living in the entirety of what had until very recently been a family home, would that be more likely to still be an actual house?
*makes notes about the H* Sorry about that. I think in that situation is was just a typo, but I'll keep an eye out to make sure it doesn't pop up in the actual story.
Re: apatrments: no, not really. Every house like this is a house full of apartments, the more ornated, the more expensive. Usually, in the ground floor is a small apartment where lives a man, a woman, or a family of "doorkeepers" - they don't pay to the owner of the house for living there, but their job is to clean the house (the corridors, the cellars), to keep all the kees if anybody loses his own, to open and close the main door for the night (or for all the day, it depends from how the owner wants it to be) and not to let in anybody who is not living there (or is not coming with an inhabitant as a guest). In the first floor, the apartments are most expensive. If the owner is living in the house, he is living here. All the others are being rented. You can have living there anybody from the middle and upper middle class. As more upstairs you proceed, the apartments are less ornated, more of them in one storey and cheaper. The reason is, they are heated usually by coal (only in the kitchen, you usually use wood for cooking) and it
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I'm kind of thrilled to finally see a question here I know something about.I spent this summer basically wandering around Prague, its neighborhoods and museums, to get a feel of what it was like right around 1910! And this summer there were several coordinated exhibits at the museums about life in the period between about 1830 and 1917.
When you say "nineteenth century" you haven't said enough. Neighborhoods changed a lot in that time (even though there are a lot of old buildings in Prague). For example, Josefov was a crowded, unsanitary slum with crumbling old buildings in it till 1890 -- and then it was a demolition and construction zone through the 19-teens, with nothing left of the old bneighborhood but the road layout, six synagogues and a cemetery.
To save myself from regurgitating everything I've learned about Prague and its social history, could you narrow down the starting point of your story?
*is very jealous* I've recently come back from a trip there, but I was only able to stay five nights. Only so much you can learn in that time, especially when you don't speak the language
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Let me meander a bit before I get to the actual questions, okay? I swear it's going to become relevant by the time I get back on topic.
In the 1880s the city was officially Austrian, belonging to a minor province called "Bohemen(Bohemia)." (Link takes you to a 1911 map, but the empire was pretty stable during the intervening period and for a while beforehand). So the official language of the city was German. The city also had a lot of ethnic Germans in it, so that when the physical culture movement started there they had a valid argument about whether the language of the organization should be in German or Czech (the Czech-speakers staged a coup while the Germans were out of town on vacation, which is how it became the Sokol movement). If this is a booklength story, which it sounds like, you're going to have to figure out how language will affect your characters. And will you use the German or the Czech names for things? If you use the Czech ones, will you be doing it for the modern audience, or to establish a nationalistic attitude
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https://archive.org/details/southerngermany00firgoog
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I'd go for further information into the contemporary writers. Maybe Jirásek, Filozofská historie - it's a story from exactly the time you need and the students are living in a rent as above, and Jirásek is very, very accurate in his details.
A side note: Please, definitely not JosefHof. No H there. It means roughly "Joseph's town part / village" and the Czech form of Joseph is Jozef - no H. (The S in Josefov is right - too difficult do explain where the orthography has changed in s/z during the last 50 years or so, and where it hasn't. :-) ) (Czech native speaker here.)
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So were apartments mostly for student living? If character two was living in the entirety of what had until very recently been a family home, would that be more likely to still be an actual house?
*makes notes about the H* Sorry about that. I think in that situation is was just a typo, but I'll keep an eye out to make sure it doesn't pop up in the actual story.
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When you say "nineteenth century" you haven't said enough. Neighborhoods changed a lot in that time (even though there are a lot of old buildings in Prague). For example, Josefov was a crowded, unsanitary slum with crumbling old buildings in it till 1890 -- and then it was a demolition and construction zone through the 19-teens, with nothing left of the old bneighborhood but the road layout, six synagogues and a cemetery.
To save myself from regurgitating everything I've learned about Prague and its social history, could you narrow down the starting point of your story?
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In the 1880s the city was officially Austrian, belonging to a minor province called "Bohemen(Bohemia)." (Link takes you to a 1911 map, but the empire was pretty stable during the intervening period and for a while beforehand). So the official language of the city was German. The city also had a lot of ethnic Germans in it, so that when the physical culture movement started there they had a valid argument about whether the language of the organization should be in German or Czech (the Czech-speakers staged a coup while the Germans were out of town on vacation, which is how it became the Sokol movement). If this is a booklength story, which it sounds like, you're going to have to figure out how language will affect your characters. And will you use the German or the Czech names for things? If you use the Czech ones, will you be doing it for the modern audience, or to establish a nationalistic attitude ( ... )
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