God raises my weakness
In her revisions Mary Shelley somewhat mitigates the picture of
institutional injustice so starkly presented in the first edition. In
particular, she pulls back sharply from her earlier representation of the
Church's place in this inhumane structure. The Justine of 1831 becomes much
more conventionally pious and more tranquilly submissive to what she conceives
to be the will of heaven.
The reasons for this shift in tone may be many and complicated. One obvious
one is that England was on the brink of the passage of the Great Reform
Bill when her novel was republished in 1831, and the prelude to that
sweeping legislation, the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts in 1828, had opened an era of
religious freedom and toleration in which such attacks would have seemed
truly of another age and ungenerous, if not intolerant, in and of
themselves.
