I recently read the unabridged version, and really enjoyed it. The pacing is a bit patchy, but has (what we would think) surprisingly modern things mentioned - cannabis, lesbianism.
If anyone wants a recommendation for another good book from around the same date, I recommend Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. It has it's adventure aspects, but is also just a great tale of male friendship between two different characters.
There's nothing anachronistic about hashish in 19th-century France; it was a widely-known narcotic long before that. If you read Wikipedia's "history" entry, Dumas and Paris are explicitly name-checked (among a lengthy list of writers),
- "In the 19th century, hashish was embraced in some European literary circles. Most famously, the Club des Hashischins was a Parisian club dedicated to the consumption of hashish and other drugs; its members included writers Théophile Gautier, Dr. Moreau de Tours, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Baudelaire and Honoré de Balzac.[19]"
If anyone wants a recommendation for another good book from around the same date, I recommend Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. It has it's adventure aspects, but is also just a great tale of male friendship between two different characters.