An Inspector Calls

Priestley uses An Inspector Calls as a piece of political drama¹: through one family's evening, he argues that we are all responsible for one another, and that a society built on selfish individualism will be punished. Writing in 1945 (the play reached the London stage in 1946) but setting the play in 1912, he exploits the gap between the two dates² so that his audience, who had lived through two world wars, could see how disastrously wrong the Birlings' world view was, and choose to build something better.

Priestley establishes the opposing view first, through Mr Birling. In the opening act Birling delivers a confident speech to Gerald and Eric dismissing the idea of community and insisting that each man should mind his own interests and protect his family. Priestley undermines him through dramatic irony: in the same evening Birling predicts that there will be no war and praises the Titanic, due to sail the following week, as unsinkable. A 1945 audience would know he was wrong about everything, so they are positioned to distrust his views on responsibility as well. Structurally, the doorbell rings at the very moment Birling finishes³, as if the play itself is answering him: the Inspector arrives as the embodiment of the idea Birling has just mocked.

The Inspector's method dramatises responsibility as a chain. He interviews each character in turn, showing the photograph to one person at a time, so that the audience watches each link being added: Birling sacking Eva after she took part in a strike for higher wages; Sheila having her dismissed from Milwards out of jealousy; Gerald keeping her as his mistress and then ending the affair; Mrs Birling refusing her help from the charity committee she chairs; and finally Eric, who got her pregnant and stole money to support her. This episodic structure, borrowed from the detective story⁴, means no single person is solely to blame, yet each contributed. Priestley's point is that cruelty in society is rarely one dramatic act; it is a series of small, selfish decisions by people who never see the consequences.

Priestley also uses class and gender to show who is protected from responsibility. Mrs Birling, the play's most unrepentant character, insists the blame lies with the young man who fathered the child, not realising this is her own son. This climax of dramatic irony at the end of Act 2 exposes her hypocrisy: her charity work is about status, not compassion. Eva Smith never appears on stage⁵, which is itself significant; she is a voiceless working-class woman spoken about by the powerful. Her ordinary name suggests she stands for countless workers, a point the Inspector makes explicit in his final speech when he reminds the family that countless ordinary men and women like her have lives that are bound up with theirs.

That final speech is the play's moral climax. The Inspector moves from the particular to the universal, insisting that all people are bound together like the parts of a single body and warning that if people refuse to learn this lesson, they will learn it through suffering on a terrible scale. To an audience in 1945 this sounds like a prophecy of the two world wars, giving the Inspector an almost supernatural authority. His name, Goole, a homophone of ghoul, adds to this sense that he is not an ordinary policeman but a moral conscience or even a ghost.

Finally, Priestley uses the twist ending to test whether the characters, and the audience, have truly accepted responsibility. When Gerald discovers there is no Inspector Goole on the force and no recent suicide, Mr and Mrs Birling are relieved and return to their old complacency, even mocking the earlier events. Sheila and Eric, however, insist that nothing they did has changed. The final telephone call, announcing that a girl has just died and that an inspector is on his way, makes the cycle begin again. This cyclical structure suggests⁶ that those who refuse to learn will be forced to repeat the lesson. Priestley, a socialist who co-founded the Common Wealth Party in 1942, was writing as Britain voted in a Labour government and moved towards the welfare state, so the play becomes a challenge to his audience: will they behave like the older Birlings, or like their children?

Priestley presents Sheila's transformation as the clearest evidence that people can learn¹; she moves from a sheltered, self-absorbed daughter to the play's most morally aware character. Through her, Priestley offers his 1945 audience hope: the younger generation is still open to change, and it is the young who can build a fairer society.

At the start Sheila is presented as a product of her privileged upbringing. The stage directions present her² as an attractive young woman in her early twenties, delighted with life and excited by the evening, and much of her early dialogue is playful and childish, teasing her brother and fussing over her engagement ring. Her relationship with Gerald is shaped by the marriage's commercial advantages for both families, and Mr Birling openly hopes it will bring Birling and Company closer to Crofts Limited. Priestley presents Sheila here as a typical young woman of the Edwardian upper-middle class: protected, dependent and largely unaware of the world beyond the dining room. Yet even at this stage there are hints of her sharpness, as she half-jokingly questions where Gerald was during the previous summer, planting the suspicion³ that later becomes the affair with Daisy Renton.

The turning point comes when the Inspector shows her the photograph. Sheila's reaction is immediate and emotional: she runs from the room and returns admitting that she had Eva sacked from Milwards because the girl looked prettier in a dress Sheila had wanted, and because Sheila was in a bad temper. Priestley makes her confession important because she is the first character to accept responsibility without excuses. Unlike her father, who argues that he was simply running his business, Sheila admits that she used her position as a valued customer to punish a shop girl. The contrast between their responses⁴ shows how differently the generations react to the Inspector.

From this point Priestley gives Sheila a role almost like the Inspector's assistant. She understands his method before the others do, warning her mother not to build a wall between herself and the girl, because the Inspector will only break it down. She sees that the Inspector already knows everything, and she is quick to point out her parents' evasions. Priestley uses her as a bridge between the Inspector and the audience⁵: she voices the realisations the audience is having. Her handing back of the engagement ring to Gerald after his confession is a symbolic rejection of the old values of status and appearance, and a sign of her growing independence as a woman.

Sheila's importance is clearest in the final act. When Gerald and Mr Birling discover the Inspector may not have been real, the older characters relax, and Mr Birling even mocks the Inspector's message. Sheila refuses to join in. She insists that it does not matter whether he was a real police inspector, because what they did was real, and she is frightened by how quickly her parents behave as though nothing has changed. Priestley presents her as more mature than her parents here: the conventional hierarchy of the family is reversed, with the daughter instructing the father. Eric supports her, so the younger generation forms a united front against the old.

This reflects Priestley's context and purpose. Writing as a socialist at the end of the Second World War, when Britain was about to elect a Labour government and build the welfare state, he believed change depended on people being willing to rethink their attitudes. Sheila's journey also reflects changing roles for women: in 1912 women could not vote⁶ in general elections, but by 1945 they had won the vote and had played a vital part in two war efforts. A woman who begins the play admiring a ring and ends it challenging her father represents that shift.

Ultimately, Sheila embodies Priestley's hope that people are not fixed by class or upbringing. The final telephone call threatens to repeat the evening's events, but because Sheila has already changed, she is prepared for the lesson in a way her parents are not. Through her, Priestley tells his audience that responsibility is a choice, and that the young can choose differently.