I seek to compare poverty and prostitution as theoretical and institutional corollaries of early 19th century urban society. The underlying intention of this comparison is to relate poverty and prostitution as separate, but concurrent, categories of immorality in the early American consciousness. In doing so, I will explore three central questions: i) How were varieties of social marginality framed in the antebellum city through philanthropic institutions? ; ii) Is the historiographical social control thesis for institutional "containment" of societal deviants consistent with the experiences of those within such institutions? ; and, iii) How successful were private and public institutions in their reformatory aspirations during the early national period? In comparing and contrasting poverty and prostitution in Philadelphia as a heuristic foil for these questions, I will concentrate on welfare institutions, for their prerogative was articulating and actualizing these categories into reformatory principles of normalcy. To this end, I hope to demystify the intentions and outcomes of the early urban institutional experience by considering the Magdalen Society and the city almshouse in their period of formative antebellum development.