There are 2 different ways to rent an apartment in the UK, one is a lodger and the other is a tenant. Sherlock Holmes is a lodger (someone who pays for a place to sleep, and usually for meals, in someone else's house), this kind of rental is more like living in a family hotel, the tenant and the landlord live together, the landlord is all including meals, making beds, cleaning the room, the tenant only lives in one of the bedrooms, and shares the living room and kitchen with the landlord. As an Lodger, even if Holmes doesn't make a big deal, the landlady will provide meals and tidy up the room.
It is also said that Sherlock Holmes has a lot of money, and if he has enough money, it is not better to become a tenant or buy an apartment. The beginning of the first story of the whole Sherlock Holmes series is that after Watson returned to the UK from Afghanistan, he gradually needed to find someone to rent with him to share the rent, he met Sherlock Holmes, and then the two of them rented Mrs. Hudson's apartment at 221 Baker Street on the second floor of the British tenant is more like our current rental, the tenants and the landlord live separately.
However, I think there will be lodgers in China in the future, and now the aborigines of big cities often change several houses at a time of demolition, even if they have average jobs and mediocre income, they don't have to share their living place with tenants, because he has more than one house. But in a dozen years, there will always be people who will gradually sit on the empty side, make ends meet, sell only one house, and then retire and the income is not enough, so they will have to rent half of their house to others like Mrs. Hudson, sharing a living room and kitchen.
It's not all about modern Chinese housing loans. It's understandable and agreeable to be angry about modern Chinese mortgages, but knowledge is knowledge, and Zhihu is now mixed with private work, and it's a bit ugly to treat emotions as knowledge. Sherlock Holmes works are from 1887 onwards, and the interior of the work is a little later, in any case, belonging to the Victorian era. The Victorian income can be found in this ** linking scholarship, teaching and learning since 1994 Sherlock Holmes once said that £100 is a huge amount of money.
And in his time, £60 a year was a great life for a single woman. Sherlock Holmes didn't say anything about his own rent, but the study of Scarlet said that other people's rents Holmes was very generous, he inquired about the problem, paid the news, usually half a pound a pound, and he earned a very good income, in the case of "Abbey School", he earned 6,000 pounds, which was after Watson 55. And a middle-class person with a certain social status earns only £700 a year. The deposit for "Bohemian Scandal" is 1,000 pounds, and "The Emerald Crown" is another 1,000 pounds.
If you think about it, a rent of 700 pounds can make a mother endure her daughter being groped, and a person like Sherlock Holmes, who has more than ten times the income of the middle class at that time, can even pay 5 pounds and 10 pounds for inquiring about the news, and does not do housework, he will definitely be able to pay a **. Do you think he's renting? He rents a service apartment, a serviced apartment, the kind with service.
And then there's the cultural background. The British did not have the concept of a servant being inferior. Note that this is not a question of equality. In ancient European courts, queens were often served by noble wives, and their husbands were generally celebrities around the king. (Of course, the dirty work is still done by the junior maid.) ）
Therefore, for a married lady in the 19th century, a part-time housekeeper was far more decent than going out and working to earn money. And it is normal for a young unmarried gentleman to not be able to afford a house, but it is too unseemly to cook in a fly restaurant every day. The supply and demand sides also hit it off.