221B Baker Street. One of the most famous addresses in literature. But why?
Was there any reason Sir Arthur Conan Doyle chose this particular address as the residence of his famous protagonist? Did he have any links to that part of London?
EDIT: I've been told the house didn't exist at the time, but the street existed, and maybe the number 221 has other significance in his life.
All the unreputable Internet sources indicate that the numbering on Baker Street in Doyle's lifetime was only up to 100. Apparently Doyle initially called the street "Upper Baker Street".
One theory is that Doyle chose 221B - a non-existing address - to avoid some poor fella living there from receiving piles of mail an unwanted clients - which is the theory I subscribe to, as this is what a decent man would do.
Apart from that, there is no information I could find that would explain why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle chose 221B of all possible (higher-than-100) addresses.
Doyle himself lived at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove, Southsea, Portsmouth, at the approximate time of writing his first stories. Wikipedia lists no accounts of Doyle living or working near Baker Street.
References (most copy each other verbatim anyway):
Conan Doyle is giving the reader a clue as to Holmes' character. Educated readers at the time of publication would have picked up on these clues.
At that time, Baker Street was an upmarket residential part of London. To the western side - so not industrial, north of the river - so more fashionable, centrally placed near to major roads and railway stations - so good for travel, not in the really expensive parts of the metropolis - so Holmes is not rich.
There are other famous - real - people who lived in Baker Street around this time or earlier, including H.G.Wells and William Pitt the Younger.
In order for someone to be able to afford rooms in Baker Street, he would have needed to be comfortably off.
All the streets and districts of London mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes stories existed at the time. So it makes sense for the author to pick a real street with a certain cachet to round out the character.
I think it is highly likely that Doyle chose a nonexistent, random, but specific name. Nonexistent, to prevent (as suggested by Gallifreyan) some poor coincidence resident from unwanted pestering; random because it was the first thing that popped into his head; and specific because specificity lends reality, and we all like to believe that stories are real. Except for horror stories, but that's a different subject altogether.
Given the somewhat speculative nature of this question here are my two bits. This may be a hidden reference to Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. In The Snark we find the mysterious Baker, who disappears at the end of the book, once he encounters a particularly dangerous type of Snark, a Boojum. This Baker is associated closely with the Carrollian number 42 or 2x21. The whole book is about being and non-being, or it may have something to do with Hamlet’s “to be or not to be,” or 2B or not 2B. Doyle, who likely met Carroll/Dodgson at one of the Psychical Society meetings, like most other educated Victorians, especially those interested in famous books involving the disappearance of a well known character, likely read The Snark.
