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In a letter to Elizabeth Montagu, written on 1 December 1759, Elizabeth Carter wrote: ‘I have not read the History of the Penitents, except a little extract, with which I was greatly pleased. It is much to be wished indeed that the general fashion of novel reading did not render such antidotes very necessary.’ Carter's account of The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House, as Supposed to be Related by Themselves (published anonymously in 1759, but dated 1760) encapsulates eighteenth-century anxieties about the effects of reading – commonly figured as an illness in anti-novel discourse of the period – on young women. She implies that novels are dangerous, communicating the immoral tendencies responsible for the epidemic of prostitution; but she also asserts that the right kind of novel can counteract the poison imbibed by promiscuous readers. According to Carter, The Histories is just such an attempt to restore the health of the body politic; it therefore participates in the public debate that produced the Magdalen House for the Reception of Penitent Prostitutes itself.

Rejecting earlier visual and literary accounts of the harlot's progress, from William Hogarth's famous six-plate series (1732) to John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–9), proponents of the Magdalen House argued that women were driven to prostitution by economic necessity rather than personal inclination. The Histories reflects this ideological shift in the stories of four fictional Magdalen inmates, whose narratives are designed to serve both as warnings against extra-marital sexual encounters and as collective testimony to the necessity for the institution that would rehabilitate them. However, the novel – with its sentimental frame-narrative and radical communal emphasis – is also strikingly different from the other meditations on prostitution reform produced by campaigners for the charity. Like the Magdalen House pamphlets, The Histories attempts to recuperate the prostitute by providing wide-ranging and detailed criticisms of the socioeconomic conditions that generated her predicament, but unlike the official publications, it also questions the motives of the institution's spokesmen, who would turn these penitent subjects into little more than ‘Objects’.