One year before Arthur Morrison's A Child of the Jago (1896) made infamous the East End slum neighbourhood known as the Old Nichol, the district received treatment in a novel written by an author who was a less likely candidate for representations of vice, violence and abject poverty: the popular writer of girls’ stories, L. T. Meade. In A Princess of the Gutter (1895), Meade engages with the generic conventions of the romance novel in its narrative trajectory, but draws on modes of realism in both its discourse and subject. The novel traces the personal transformation of Joan Prinsep, a Girton graduate who is left a fortune upon her uncle's death, but who is distressed when she discovers that its source is the tenure of a series of slum properties concentrated in Shoreditch. Following the romance convention of the rescue plot, Joan is inspired to settle in the East End with the ambition of helping to ameliorate the lives and living conditions of the local population. In this sense, the novel is organised around her personal transformation but also the material transformation of the people with whom she lives: Joan's benefaction to the district is a block of model dwellings, the ‘Joan Mansions’, which replaces the former slum properties.

The novel's subject is a familiar one and, as Lynne Hapgood notes, is based on the slum fiction of the early 1880s such as Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) and George Gissing's Workers in the Dawn (1880). Like these novels, A Princess of the Gutter is textured by its engagement with the conditions of urban poverty and is preoccupied by contemporaneous efforts for social justice. The novel's integration of romance and realism is not merely aesthetic; it is also political. A Princess of the Gutter makes use of the generic conventions of romance and realism in order to engage in contemporary debates about the settlement movement and the degree to which religious philosophy was necessary in order for this method of social action to be effective.