Museum Collections

The Highlander, typically associated with snuff, was a common type of English shop figure during the nineteenth century. Charles Dickens described one in his novel Little Dorrit: "The business was of too modest a character to support a life-sized Highlander, but it maintained a little one on a bracket on the door-post, who looked like a fallen Cherub that had found it necessary to take to a kilt." The size of this example suggests it was intended to be placed on a counter rather than in front of a shop.