“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.