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.