Greatest Show on Earth could not by any known means be transported to heaven. The first edition of the book in 1855 bore the dedication: “To the Universal Yankee Nation, of Which I Am Proud to Be One, I Dedicate These Pages, Dating Them from the American Museum, Where the Public First Smiled Upon Me, and Where Henceforth My Personal Exertions Will Be Devoted to Its Entertainment.” The book caused a storm of protest on the literary side and enjoyed a popular success almost immediately. Many of the editors who reviewed Barnum’s book were shocked, and England was especially mortified. The élite, the classes, had taken up Barnum, called madly for General Tom Thumb for their week-end parties and evening fêtes, rushed after Jenny Lind, and now Barnum had the audacity and the bad taste to take his machine apart and show those who had watched it eagerly how it turned the wheels of their fatuity. They recognized their folly,--and blamed him for it. _Blackwood’s Magazine_, _Fraser’s Magazine_, _Tait’s Edinburgh Review_ in Great Britain, and the _Southern Literary Messenger_ in the United States, among others, wrote ten page reviews of the _Life of P. T. Barnum Written by Himself_. They recalled the shades of Cagliostro and other famous and comparative rascals and impostors to prove that Barnum was the present world’s worst woe. The editors were very angry, and through the pages of their reviews one can hear the sounds of their gasps of perturbation in their too apparent determination to finish this charlatan once for all by a mighty stroke of a thundering pen, wielded for the common good. The burden of their complaints was that Barnum had deceived the world by his brazen curiosities: Joice Heth, he admitted, may not have been 161 years old; General Tom Thumb was born in Bridgeport, not imported from England, and was five years old, not eleven: The Woolly Horse and Colonel Frémont were strangers. And Barnum boldly admitted his deceptions in his book. It was immoral, said the editors. No one of them had had the perspicacity to doubt Barnum’s integrity when his ventures were presented for admiration. The editors, along with their wives and children, had screamed their delight. It took Barnum himself to tell them the secret that they had been humbugged, and they never forgave his lack of editorial ethics. To have whispered privately in an editor’s ear that he was only spoofing him would have been taken in confidence and with dignity, for the editor could then have bragged about it from his club chair. But to take in the public and the editor too was unpardonable sin, and the man who did it was a scoundrel, and no mistake. One New York newspaper writer was also shocked by Barnum’s admission that he did good for his own profit: that was a radical and cynical principle of ethics, which turned slightly sour the milk of human kindness.