The forgotten story of a Victorian child star uncovered

Fame is a fickle thing – and this point is well made by the painting of an opulently dressed girl being taught to play a stringed instrument that now hangs in the City of London's Guildhall Art Gallery.

Researchers preparing for an exhibition on Victorian attitudes to childhood, called Seen and Heard, have found that Connie Gilchrist, the forgotten young musician in painter Frederic Leighton's canvas entitled The Music Lesson, was once the toast of England and appeared in many Christmas pantomimes in the West End of London as well as in countless burlesque shows.

The child star, then known as "the original Gaiety Girl", made her name on stage at 12 with a novelty skipping rope act. But even at that early age, Gilchrist's face was well known across London. From the age of four she had posed for many of the great artists of the era, including Frank Holl, William Powell Frith and James McNeill Whistler, and for photographs taken by Lewis Carroll.

"Her features somehow caught the Victorian imagination," said Katty Pearce, curator at the Guildhall gallery. "She was painted several times, even before her fame at the Drury Lane theatre, which took off around the time of the painting and was really like her Britain's Got Talent moment."

Gilchrist's is a remarkable rags-to-riches story, yet one masked by her later identity as Countess of Orkney, the name by which she went until her death in 1946.

Leighton's sumptuous 1877 painting shows Gilchrist playing the saz, a Turkish stringed instrument, in a scene influenced by the artist's visit to Damascus in 1873. But it is not the portrait of a child of the English aristocracy. In fact, Gilchrist had been born in the slum area behind King's Cross station – a district described in 1851 by the writer WM Thomas as "a complete bog of mud and filth" – which was demolished the year after her birth in 1865.

"Connie had been pushed into celebrity by her mother, it seems, in the hope she would be able to pull the family out of poverty – which she eventually did," said Pearce. "But although she appeared in hundreds of stage shows, becoming a star turn, those who met her in artists' studios remembered her as quite a sad little girl."

Gilchrist was six when she began sitting for Leighton, and she is the Arab girl in his painting Little Fatima. Whistler even attempted to depict her skipping rope routine in an etching. By 1875 she had also played a Christmas season in the West End and at 14 she won a full-time contract with London's Gaiety theatre, going on to play Maid Marian in Little Robin Hood and Miranda in a parody of Shakespeare's The Tempest.

But Gilchrist was able to quit the stage for good after doing an American tour in 1886. Her two wealthy benefactors, Lord Lonsdale and the Duke of Beaufort, had introduced her into high society, one buying a London home for all the Gaiety theatre girls, which he then left to Gilchrist, and the other becoming in effect her adoptive father. In 1892 Gilchrist married a Scottish peer, the 7th Earl of Orkney in London, and they lived quietly together for 53 years in his home near Leighton Buzzard.

Internet glasses shoppers and loaves of banana nut bread

Are you wondering if other practices are charging for adding pupillary distance (PD) to prescriptions and adjusting glasses purchased online for free? If so, how does this fit into your mission statement and strategic goals?

I'm reminded of my neighbor's college-age daughter and my banana nut bread. She loves it so much that she asked her mother to get the recipe. I gladly provided it and her mom thought I had left out the "secret sauce" because her daughter prefers mine to her own.

Throw out the advice that the customer is always right. There are three different ways to provide a PD measurement to patients who take their prescriptions, purchase eyewear from somewhere else, and then bring the eyewear to you for adjustments.

Financial Impact
If your cost of goods is calculated properly and it is 33% or lower, then your complimentary services are not hurting your bottom-line. This metric suggests that patients who want to purchase eyewear are waited on promptly. Consumers express displeasure by leaving the building. Patients are less likely to become annoyed when they are attended to, so employees should always provide a patient with a PD.


On the other hand, the auto refractor used during pre-testing provides a PD without overloading busy opticians.

Your employees wanting to drop tasks without a change in job description might mean that both they and you need to re-read your employee policy manual or handbook. If it is not legally, morally or ethically inappropriate the question becomes one of office harmony and profitability versus what an employee wants to do or his or her preference.


Your Practice's Brand
If you haven't thought about your practice brand, here is your chance. An Internet search of healthcare branding advice confirms that both big and little issues influence the patient.
Adjectives like "friendly" and "helpful" describe someone who does something for nothing. In Louisiana and other Gulf states the word "lagniappe" could be used to describe the practice of giving a patient who pays for an eye-health examination their PD and adjusting eyewear purchased somewhere else.


It is said that shopkeepers tried to put an end to the practice of lagniappe in the 1800s, but the people strenuously objected. They had no choice but to keep giving a little something extra. (It is not certain whether this story is true.)

Although the tradition of a free gift is not nearly as widespread as it once was, it is still observed in optical dispensaries. Stop giving patients their PDs (which are not by law included in their prescription) and they may join their ancestors and object strenuously.

Beijing blames video games for kids needing glasses

It started last week with a call to action from China's leader, Xi Jinping. Too many of the country's children need glasses, he said, and the government was going to do something about it.

It ended Friday with billions of dollars being wiped from the market value of the world's largest video game company.

New controls on online games were among Chinese authorities' recommendations for reducing adolescent nearsightedness on Thursday, sending shares in the country's leading game publisher, Tencent, tumbling the next day. Shares of Japanese game makers like Capcom, Konami and Bandai Namco also fell Friday, a sign of the size and importance of the Chinese market.

The sell-off is the latest in a series of government-related stumbles for Tencent, one of the world's largest technology companies. Chinese state media has blamed video games for causing young people to become addicted, lowering their grades and worse. An incident last year, in which a 17-year-old in the southern city of Guangzhou died after playing a smartphone game for 40 hours straight, received wide attention.

As the biggest game distributor in the world's biggest game market, Tencent has grown fantastically rich in recent years. It has bought up game developers around the world, including the makers of influential titles such as "League of Legends" and "Clash of Clans." It owns a stake in Epic Games, creator of the international blockbuster "Fortnite."

Back at home, Tencent also operates China's most popular messaging app, WeChat, and processes a big chunk of the smartphone payments that are now used to make transactions of all kinds in the country.

But over the past year, Tencent's hugely profitable game business has come under fire as Beijing takes a more forceful approach to guiding Chinese culture — a reminder of the state's growing role in deciding the fortunes of the country's largest and most innovative private companies.

Last year, the Communist Party's official mouthpiece, the People's Daily, called the Tencent-developed battle game "Honor of Kings" a "poison" on young minds. In response, the company imposed limits on the amount of time young people could spend playing it each day.

More recently, Chinese regulators blocked sales of another Tencent title — "Monster Hunter: World" — because it was deemed too gory. The company's stock also took a slide after executives said that a bureaucratic reshuffle had slowed the process for getting licences to make money on new games such as the mobile version of "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds."

Tencent's shares fell 5 per cent in Friday trading in Hong Kong. A company spokesman declined to comment.

Why people love to hate tiny sunglasses

All fashion trends are scams, but every so often, one bubbles up in the collective consciousness and forces us all to be mad at it at the same time. Right now it's tiny sunglasses, those diminutive, barely eyeball-size versions that don't seem to perform their stated function of providing shade very well at all.

They're the sort worn by the likes of Kendall and Kylie Jenner, Bella and Gigi Hadid, and various other children of famous people (Zoe Kravitz, Kaia Gerber, Hailey Baldwin), as well as Instagram influencers whose names you might not know but whose aesthetic mimics those of the ones you do.

But these shades' lack of practicality isn't why we're mad at them.

Because, to be fair, everything fashionable is less practical than the alternative, which is either a) being fully naked when it's hot, b) wearing utility jumpsuits with a million pockets when it's medium, or c) wearing the skin of an enormous furry animal when it's cold. That clothes are not always functional is hardly controversial. Yet tiny sunglasses are.

This summer, two bona fide famouses echoed the opinions many others had already expressed over drinks or online during the past year, which is that these things are bad.

"I think we will regret this tiny sunglasses look," tweeted Mindy Kaling; Anne Hathaway then took a screenshot and Instagrammed it in agreement.

How to find your eyeglass prescription without getting an exam

Want to freshen your face with a new pair of eyeglass frames? As you probably know, you can save a small fortune by ordering glasses online.

Just one wrinkle: You need to know your prescription. Sure, you can call your optometrist to get the numbers -- unless the office is closed. Or you just feel weird about asking because they'll know you're shopping elsewhere.

Thankfully, if you have a pretty basic prescription (meaning they're not bifocals, progressives or Coke-bottle lenses), there's a free tool from GlassesUSA.com that can scan your current glasses. I took it for a spin with my son's glasses and the results matched his current prescription.

And according to GlassesUSA.com, the results are "in line with the standard range of deviation as in any doctor's office" -- though this isn't meant to take the place of an eye exam. Indeed, if you haven't had your vision checked in a year or more, it might make sense to schedule an appointment. 

But if you just want a quick and easy way to find out what kind of lenses you have right now, here's how:

Step 1: Armed with your current glasses, your phone and a credit card (which is used for sizing, not payment), plunk down in front of your computer and point your browser to www.glassesusa.com/scan.

Step 2: Enter your phone number or email address to receive a link for the GlassesUSA app.

Step 3: Once you've installed the app, following the guided tutorial. You'll first need to scan an onscreen QR code, then hold the credit card up to the screen and scan that. From there you'll hold your glasses between the phone and the screen for various readings. It ends with a pupillary-distance (PD) scan, which rather amusingly requires you to hold the card up to your forehead.

It's a pretty simple process that takes all of about 10 minutes. When you're done, you'll be asked to create a GlassesUSA.com account, at which point you should immediately see your prescription.

And that's it! Armed with that data, you can order lenses and frames from anywhere. Just take note that the app doesn't store any of this information; if you want to retrieve it later, you'll have to sign back into your GlassesUSA.com account in a browser.