An artifact of the history of childhood, a small white toy dog stands on four paws, a pink, white, brown, and gold striped ribbon around its neck tied in a bow. The dog is about eight centimetres high and twelve centimetres in length, resembling a West Highland Terrier or Scottish Terrier. It has small, glass, amber-coloured eyes that look out from its triangular face. The dog’s white plush fabric fur is pristine and seems untouched, like snow covering the side of a mountain in the morning, with no visible signs of discolouration or wear. A seam running down the back of the toy joins sections of faux fur; underneath this fur, a light metal structure that gives the toy its four-legged frame. Small enough to be held in one hand, this toy has enough shape to stand unsupported. It normally sits on a shelf in the child’s room on the second floor of Dalnavert Museum. A contradictory object, it looks deceivingly soft while actually being quite stiff; while it looks fluffy and like something a child could love, it sits here untouched. The origin of this object, including the names of the people who made it and the person who valued it enough to keep it pristine, are no longer known. This object invites speculation, encouraging us to imagine its significance for the child who was likely its first owner.

As Ira Bruce Nadel explains in her essay “‘The Mansion of Bliss,’ or the Place of Play in Victorian Life and Literature,” play was a Victorian status symbol, not only because child labour laws meant working-class children were far more likely to have jobs than free time to romp in the park, but also because play was a means to teach the ideal to Victorian society.¹ Play was imaginative, play was competitive, and play taught children “the satisfaction of achieving victory – in getting the better of an antagonist”.² Play in the Victorian era was intended to teach children about success, but it also taught upper-class British children about superiority. Imaginative play slowly increased in popularity over the Victorian era, with children’s toys frequently resembling real-world objects. Animals were a source of inspiration for many toy makers who created toy versions of farmyard animals, exotic animals, and pets such as the wee dog here.³

This toy dog is both a constructed commodity and a status symbol that taught Victorian children about their place in the world. Toys model societal ideals and a core ideal of Victorian Britain was Imperialism. Parents gifted their children toys that reflected their values, values they wanted to impart to their children. One might give a child a toy train to gloat about the superiority of British engineering, a toy crown to boast about the British monarchy, or a toy dog to celebrate the superiority of British dog breeds.

Victorians’ attitudes toward dogs were complex; on the one hand, many Victorians loved dogs as companions yet, on the other hand, there was growing fascination with the collection of purebred dogs, which were viewed by many people as status symbols. The emergence of a nationwide obsession with dog breeds is signalled by the first dog-show, which was held in 1859, and by the creation of the British Kennel Club, an organization, founded in 1873, which to this day keeps track of dog breed lineages.⁴ The Victorian era also witnessed the opening of the Battersea Dog’s Home in London, in 1860, to help find dogs living on the streets loving homes.⁵ Yet even in the case of this and other Dog’s Homes, dogs with pedigree or more aesthetically pleasing dogs were kept to be sold, whereas so-called mongrels were often put down due to their undesirability.⁶ It seems that, as much as dogs were loved, for a middle-class family, a dog was also a status symbol. A dog needed to be the right sort of dog to maintain the right sort of status for the family. Perhaps a kennel-club-certified Scottish Terrier would allow a family like the Macdonald family, the family for which Dalnavert was built, to signal both their privilege and their family heritage. And if a real dog of this breed could not be found, perhaps a toy dog for a child in the family would do.

When I first entered Dalnavert Museum, I knew about the Macdonald family through John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada, who played a central role in spreading the poison of residential schools throughout Canada. I knew that, like me, he was born in Glasgow. I knew this house was owned by a middle-class family of second- and third-generation Scottish immigrants and, as a Scottish immigrant myself, I began, perhaps selfishly, searching for an item that reminded me of home: I found this toy dog. Originally it filled me with joy: a little toy that looks just like a Scottie dog so far from home like I am, lost in the prairies somewhere. But the more I learnt about dogs as status symbols, the more I learnt about play being a way to teach Victorian ideals, the more I found the little dog troubling. This sweet little creature, meant to be loved, kept instead on a shelf with its fur untouched, represents ideals of British purity, competitiveness, and superiority. It is an artifact that evokes both joy and loss. It is a celebration of dogs and of the joy they bring into our lives, an item that was likely loved and cherished. It is also, however, an item that celebrates the purity of dog breeding and the superiority inherent in colonial Victorian British culture. It is a child’s toy in the wrong place, in this land of lost children, referencing a home far away that it will never know. Somehow anything from home in this context feels like it cannot be innocent.