These endless details don't stop at the apartment: consider the regular cataloguing of the city of London as a whole: from Hyde Park and the Serpentine in "The Noble Bachelor" to opium dens and the Thames in "The Man With the Twisted Lip." There's the fictional Saxe-Coburg Square of "The Red-Headed League" mingled with the completely real St. But having all of these things brought up to set the scene gives 221B Baker Street a sense of real, physical presence that makes it compelling to read about (and Sidney Paget's illustrations don't hurt). The apartment where Holmes and (sometimes) Watson live (the chronology jumps around) is absolutely filled with stuff: gold snuff cases, scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, an encyclopedia, a shoe filled with tobacco, Holmes's chemical apparatus, a sofa, a pipe-rack… Seriously, you have to wonder how anyone gets into the room at all, it's so packed. And one way it does this is through the setting. But, of course, all of this is the product of Conan Doyle's imagination, so we guess that's a – joke? Anyway, whether we're laughing or not, we have to admit that The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, while totally fictional, does go to a lot of trouble to look like reality.
We pointed out that Conan Doyle is always making these odd little self-conscious remarks about fiction: Holmes often tells Watson that reality produces way weirder stuff than the imagination of any author could cook up.
You may have read in our "Character Analysis" of Sherlock Holmes that we asked if Holmes might have been a real guy (the answer is no, by the way). 221B Baker Street, London, the center of the British Empire, the late nineteenth century
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