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. Fan mail arrived from all over the world addressed to: ‘Barnum, America’. A little boy at one of Barnum’s shows of fantastic beasts tugged his father’s sleeve and asked: ‘Say, Pa, which cage is Barnum in?’ A bear, a whale, a REAL!, AUTHENTIC!, BO-NA FI-DE! mermaid were interesting enough, but a Barnum… Now, that was a creature worth seeing.

And see him you will this Christmas, played by Hugh Jackman in The Greatest Showman, an all-singing, all-dancing, all-elephants film of his life, and by Marcus Brigstocke in a revival of the 1980 Broadway stage musical Barnum.

Expect adverts, trailers, posters. Expect hype worthy of the great showman himself. Roll-up, roll-up! ‘Advertising is like learning,’ quipped Barnum. ‘A little is a dangerous thing.’ And if the reviews are bad? No matter. Barnum always said he didn’t care what the public thought of him, so long as they talked about him.