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
