Oh, what a circus

‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ That was the P.T. Barnum battle cry. It has come to have a ring of contempt, but no one loved a sucker more than Barnum. Entertain them, he said. Thrill them, shock them. Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry. Give ’em the old razzle-dazzle. And if, in the course of the evening, you extract from them a penny, a shilling, a dollar… Well, have you not given them a story to tell their friends tomorrow?

His critics called him a scoundrel, a humbug, a con man. To the Times he was ‘the most adventurous and least scrupulous of showmen… an apotheosis of notoriety’. His defence? What he did wasn’t cheating or swindling: it was show business.

Did the public object to making Barnum rich in what he happily called ‘dirty dollars’? Did they hell! They queued round the block to give him their last cent. They named their babies after him.