Given Margaret Harkness's commitment to progressive causes and, particularly in her early life, her support of socialist politics, it is perhaps surprising that her first novel A City Girl (1887) so derides the efforts of an important antecedent to the state provision of housing in Britain: the model dwellings movement. Initiated by a philanthropic interest in improving the housing conditions of the industrious working classes, the model dwellings movement was equally given its impetus by a string of legislative changes to housing policy from roughly mid-century. The creation of the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1856 gave local councils the authority to condemn and demolish insanitary dwellings, but there was little provision for councils to replace the housing of those who were evicted under such city improvement projects – which were often little more than forms of social cleansing. The Labouring Classes Dwelling Houses Acts of 1866 and 1867 provided some coherence in legislation across London's municipal boroughs, and offered an incentive for positive rather than negative provision. The Acts allowed model dwellings companies to borrow money from the government's Public Works Loan Commissioners below market rate in order to finance the purchase of clearance sites and the construction of working-class housing. Most model dwellings companies, of which there were approximately thirty operating in London in the latter half of the century, promised investors an annual dividend of roughly 5 per cent and thus the business model earned the sobriquets ‘five per cent philanthropy’ and ‘capitalist philanthropy’. Model dwellings companies operated on a principle of private investment, but the experiment would have been impossible without preferential borrowing rates and significant government assistance. In this sense, such companies combined capitalist enterprise with government support and in doing so were ideologically pitched between self-help and civic paternalism.

Yet for Harkness, who was consistently critical of economic motives, the model dwellings movement was an inadequate response to the social inequity created by capitalism. Worse still, the hypocritical model of capitalist philanthropy risked exploiting the very people it purported to help. In A City Girl, Harkness connects the model of economic paternalism that characterised the model dwellings movement with the familiar narrative of the fallen woman – which, as Sally Ledger notes, Harkness partly rewrites.