William James (Royal Navy officer, born 1881) sat as a subject for several paintings by his grandfather, Millais. The most well-known of these is "Bubbles", in which the five-year-old William is shown gazing enraptured at a bubble he has just blown. When the painting was used in an advertisement for Pears soap, it became famous. The image dogged James throughout his life, and he was regularly nicknamed "Bubbles". James pursued a career in the Royal Navy, rising to hold a number of important positions. Following early service on the training ship HMS "Britannia", he was confirmed in the rank of sub-lieutenant on 15 April 1901. He was
Pears' Cyclopaedia Pears' Cyclopaedia Pears' Cyclopaedia is a one-volume encyclopaedia published in the United Kingdom. Pears' Soap launched the original "Pears' Shilling Cyclopaedia" in December 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. The first edition contained an English dictionary, a medical dictionary, a gazetteer and atlas, desk information and a compendium of general knowledge entitled "A Mass of Curious and Useful Information and Things that everyone ought to know in Commerce, History, Science, Religion, Literature and the other Topics of Ordinary Conversation". Each edition traditionally featured an atlas, a gazetteer, a chronological list of events, a list of prominent people (past