In 1853 William Page, an American painter living in Rome who was known for his portraits of men and women, discovered what he considered to be a new scientific way of measuring the proportions of the human body. He was inspired by a favorite authority of the Swedenborgians, the Book of Revelation. In an article published in 1879, “The Measure of a Man,” Page remembered:

While seeking for truth of form and adjusting the proportions of my manikins, a remarkable statement in the Revelation engaged my attention: “And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel.”– Revelation, xxi (see 12-17 inclusive).

Thomas Sergeant Perry, Who in 1858 was a schoolfellow of Henry James at Newport, recalls the fifteen-year-old future author “as an uninterested scholar…. I have not forgotten his amusement at seeing in the Manual of English Literature that we were studying, in the half page devoted to Mrs. Browning, that she had married R. Browning, ‘himself no mean poet.’ This compact information gave him great delight, for we were reading Browning.” Perry's comment is both intriguing and significant, in view of the close and enduring acquaintance, at first literary and later personal as well, that James was to establish with the husband of Elizabeth Barrett. Browning was, in fact, destined to play no mean part in the younger writer's artistic formation. James himself, however, in Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), attributes his introduction to Browning's poetry to the powerful influence of the young painter John La Farge, whom he came to know during the same period at Newport: “[La Farge] revealed to us Browning for instance; and this, oddly enough, long after Men and Women had begun (from our Paris time on, if I remember) to lie upon our parents' book-table.

It is generally agreed that Robert Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi, in expressing his notions about painting, is to a certain extent putting forth the poet's own artistic creed, which was very much like George Eliot's: “to give a faithful account of men and things.” The Florentine monk captured in painting those he saw from day to day, and, after writing “Fra Lippo Lippi,” Browning himself became increasingly insistent upon basing his poems on contemporary people and surrounding them with the bric-a-brac of daily life. Following Men and Women (1855), then, Dramatis Personae (1864) marks the end of Browning's overwhelming predilection for the historical personage; thenceforward he was to have a much greater interest in presenting the men and women of his day. Of course, some poems are concerned with the contemporary only indirectly, such as “A Death in the Desert,” the poet's answer to Ernest Renan's La Vie de Jésus (1863). Many others, however, portray men of the day speaking in their own voices. “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium,’” for example, consists of the voice of D. D. Home, the American medium, whom Mrs. Browning had admired. This interest in treating contemporaries seems much of the time to have accompanied a desire to enlarge his characters' living space. In such works as Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), Fifine at the Fair (1872), and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), Browning allowed his dramatis personae to speak for about a hundred and fifty pages instead of for a few hundred lines as most often before. Still, his contemporaries continued to have prominent voices in collections of shorter poems: Dramatic Idyls, Second Series, especially “Clive” (1880); Jocoseria, especially “Donald” (1883), and Parleyings with Certain People, especially “With George Bubb Doddington” (1887).

“Modern Poetry” was the caption of Carlo Pellegrini's caricature illustrating Vanity Fair's article on Browning (“the best of our professors of modern poetry”), containing the first notice of The Inn Album, which was published on 19 November 1875. Viewed in retrospect, the caption seems particularly apt as an announcement of The Inn Album. In content, the poem was modern, contemporary to the point of topicality. The very selection of contemporary upper-middle-class life as a subject was an especially modern undertaking in the mid-seventies, within a twelve-month period that included both Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, the latter of which Lewes described as, like Middlemarch, “a story of English life but of our own day, and dealing for the most part in a higher sphere of Society.” The Inn Album found its material in contemporary manners, just as Browning's poems that had preceded it in the seventies had addressed themselves, in various ways, to other aspects of contemporary life. In addition, references in The Inn Album to contemporary styles in the arts call attention to the poem as a poem and relate it, also, to modern art.

One of the most melancholy events in modern literary history was the dispersal of the books, manuscripts, and other artifacts owned by Pen Browning at the Sotheby sale of 1–8 May 1913. Not only did that event mark the ultimate frustration of Pen's dream of keeping together, for sentiment's sake, the bits and pieces of his parents' lives that he had been collecting through the years, but the sale also had a seriously detrimental effect upon subsequent Browning scholarship. Whereas Tennyson scholars, for example, can today examine that poet's entire personal library and a large collection of his family papers in the Tennyson Research Centre at Lincoln, the corresponding materials for the Brownings are scattered all over the world.

“Sure I am that all the light we can let in upon our own minds, all the acquaintance we can make with our own understandings, will not only be very pleasant, but bring us great advantage in directing our thoughts to the search of other things.” Locke/— Under the authority of so great a man, I proceed to the investigation of myself with no small anxiety— Hitherto I have forgotten myself, I have thought neither of my few perfections or my many failings— I have endeavoured to insinuate myself into the windings of other souls, of other characters— I have endeavoured, I may say, to seek truth with an ardent eye, a sincere heart—of that I can boast—but I have never, even in imagination looked into my own heart— How few indeed know themselves! The investigation of oneself is an anxious employment— The heart may appear corrupted by vanity, exalted by pride, soured by ill temper, & then that brilliant phantom, so dear to every soul, self estimation, fades for ever, & those shining clouds, on which you have soared so often to fame, sink under self-debasement—but shall such weakness prevent us from looking into ourselves? No.— I am not vain, but I have some tincture of pride about me, which I fear not to own, on the contrary which I like to boast of— I am not at all insensible to flattery, when in a proportionate degree, but when outraged, I am conscious of it— I prefer praise most when seasoned with censure, as it then appears in the light of truth— I detest flattery when offered by those whom I feel unworthy, I detest flattery when carried, as I said before, beyond just limits— I confess that I enjoy fame more than any worldly pleasure; I know it is transient, & yet I worship it as such— I am fond of reading & of all literary occupations— I hate needlework & drawing because I never feel occupied whilst I work or draw— I know not why, but I always am fatigued— Dancing I consider mere idleness— I abhor music.— I am told it is the trouble of learning that I dislike— It is not so— I have no desire to learn— I always feel weary, full of ennui at the Piano— I sit down discontented, and I rise disgusted.

Alfred Price Barrett Moulton-Barrett, known to his family as “Daisy,” was born at Hope End, Herefordshire, on 20 May 1820, the sixth son and tenth child of Edward and Mary Moulton-Barrett.

He was fourteen years younger than his eldest sister Elizabeth, whose essay, “Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character,” reprinted in pp. 121–33 of this volume, shows that she already “read Homer in the original with delight inexpressible, together with Virgil.” She had also completed in 1817–18 her first major work in verse, The Battle of Marathon, which appeared in print, through her father's indulgence, in the year of Alfred's birth. Thus she was already established as a scholar and a poetess, already somewhat set apart from her brothers, except the beloved “Bro” with whom she shared the study of the classics.