An Inspector Calls, as its curtain rises, does not seem particularly different from many other plays popular in the same period. A middle-class family sits around a table, having just enjoyed a satisfying dinner, and the maid clears the table. The scene sets the expectation that this is going to be a family drama, maybe even a comedy, and the focus will be on this happy family environment. Yet, Priestley’s play undergoes a subtle shift in mood and tone until it has become something much more unusual, which defies both its initial expectations and its seeming naturalism.
This first tableau, for example, can be seen as something other as a cozy emblem of this rich family’s life, for among them is a picture of one of the “millions and millions” of Eva Smiths, here working for what is likely a minimum wage, clearing the table and putting out port and cigars. It is no accident, surely, that “Eva” the girl and “Edna” the maid have such similar names. The presence of Edna onstage throughout the play symbolizes the presence of Eva and reinforces Priestley’s ultimate point about the abuse of power and the failure to take sufficient responsibility for one’s actions toward others.
Immediately, with the Inspector’s interrogations of Birling and Sheila, we see Priestley’s key salvo: the lower-class individuals are the responsibility of the middle and upper classes. This idea draws on traditional class morality. But as the society has become less hierarchical, the new way of expressing this morality is to say that society at large should care for people who are poor and need support. As Birling did not worry about firing the girls who led the strike for more wages, as Sheila did not think twice about causing the shop assistant to get in trouble, so too do the Birlings routinely ignore Edna during the play. Edna’s silence in the play, though she begins as a natural component of the comfortable family room as the curtain rises, gradually comes to seem more and more significant as the play goes on.
The Essay on What Are Your First Impressions On The Birling Family In An Inspector Calls
The play tells of a wealthy family, who are themselves aristocratic, and above the rest of society. They live in a business-like atmosphere, mostly however, filled with lies, prejudice, and greed from Mr. Birling’s need to achieve higher status. Priestly was known for his concerns about the social order of the world, and conveys this through morality in An Inspector Calls, giving his audience the ...
The early part of the act provides further indicators of what is to come. Sheila’s slightly acidic comment about Gerald’s supposed absence last summer plants the idea that there must be a better reason for the absence (we will learn it soon enough: Gerald has had a lover), and her comment illustrates the cracks which are present from the very beginning in the relationship between Sheila and Gerald. Eric’s unmotivated laugh in the middle of the conversation helps us to understand, later in the play, that he probably is “squiffy” as Sheila suggests, though it is not until much later that his alcohol problem will come to light. Priestley carefully structures the play so that the careful listener or reader will hear these ambiguous possibilities of trouble.
The centerpiece of this first part of the play, though, is the self-satisfied attitude of Arthur Birling. He is indeed, as he puts it, every inch the “hard-headed man of business.” Smug and sure of himself, he launches into a series of assertions which Priestley’s 1946 audience would have known only too well to be false. Birling asserts that there will not be another war, yet, two years after this utterance (the play is set in 1912) the First World War was to begin. Moreover, the 1946 audience would have only just managed to live through the Second World War of 1939 to 1945. Birling also asserts that the Titanic, which sets sail “next week,” is “unsinkable,” yet the audience knows that the ship sank only a little later in 1912. Priestley’s original audience probably would have found Birling’s reference to the Titanic more distressing than a modern audience because some of them may have known people who died in the disaster. Priestley’s dramatic irony, then, is poignant, not merely coy and comfortable, for the audience.
The Essay on J.B Priestley and his audience
J.B Priestley is someone who has seen enough of the world to make his own judgments. Therefore he has written this play “An Inspector Calls” to get these views of his across to the rest of the audience. He believes in socialism and doesn’t support the view of capitalism. He tries to promote socialism and show capitalism as an act of egotism. The two main views of society he has ...
Birling’s politics of self-reliance and personal responsibility are staunchly and unashamedly capitalist, perhaps even right-wing. He believes in “low wages, high prices,” is absolutely dismissive of Eva’s strike, and, even at the close of the Inspector’s inquiry, can only limply claim that he would “give thousands” to make things better. Money, indeed, dominates the way he thinks, even to the extent that, Priestley subtly illustrates, he sees his daughter’s engagement to Gerald Croft as a financial move and potentially the first step towards a merger between the Birling and Croft businesses. Birling represents the political point of view opposite to Priestley’s own. Birling even makes himself out to be the antithesis of left-leaning writers and intellectuals generally, namely George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, both very famously left-wing voices.
Birling, moreover, represents “Middle England.” This term is used generally to describe the right-leaning majority of the British public. Though it is a modern-day term, it could just as well apply to the middle-class, right-leaning majority of Priestley’s Britain.
Yet, although Birling and his wife are indeed middle-class, Priestley tells us in one of his stage directions (though it is never explicitly referred to in the play itself) that Sybil is “a rather cold woman and her husband’s social superior.” Birling is throughout the play ticked down by his wife: early in this act, for instance, for complimenting the servants on the meal in front of a guest. Sybil, presumably from a better social background than Birling, seems to be, in an imperious, passive way, the one in control of the marriage—and of her husband. Birling himself seems to have worked his way up to the middle classes (he is “provincial in his speech,” Priestley tells us in another stage direction, which might be another clue to his background) and, as he explains to Gerald, he is currently trying to see his way to a knighthood and therefore greatly improving his social position. In short, the Birlings have ambitions to move up the social scale.
The Essay on Inspectors Role In The Play Inspector Birling Character
... start it (rather savagely) to Birling." The Inspectors role in the play is not simply to confront each ... of the Inspector in 'An Inspector Calls' by J. B. Priestley "An Inspector Calls" by J B Priestley, was written ... to be anything very terrible at the time" Gerald felt the need to conceal his involvement ... that they are responsible for the death of Eva Smith, at points, gaining their respect, and ...
Gerald’s parents, for their part, “Sir George and Lady Croft,” already have their knighthood, and their business is considerably older and more successful than Birling’s. They, we presume, are an upper-class family, and although we never meet them, Gerald’s mother (like Sybil) seems to have a real eye on social status, feeling that Gerald “might have done better for [himself] socially.” Is this, we might suggest, the reason for their not being at the Birlings’ little celebratory dinner—do they disapprove that much? The initial lack of interest of the Birlings and people like them towards the fate of Eva Smith, in turn, is part of the overall class structure in England at this time, and Priestley, even this early in the play, draws our attention to the way that Lady Croft looks down on Birling just as he looks down on Eva.
It is interesting to examine who is control in each part of the play, and interesting too that the visiting police inspector (a staple, in fact, of drama in plays like Dial M for Murder) begins not as an avenging angel, but as a rather unremarkable character. Birling dominates their first conversation, boasting about his status as a former Lord Mayor and a magistrate. Yet Priestley still leaves us interesting clues. From what we know about the Inspector’s later (seemingly supernatural) abilities, his statement “I’ve only recently transferred” carries tantalizingly ambiguous double meanings. How and from where (what town? what planet? what time?) has he “transferred?”
The Inspector’s power and insight into the situation is only really glimpsed, in this first act, by Sheila, who ominously predicts to Gerald as the curtain goes down that everyone will come to see that the Inspector knows far more than anyone realizes. Yet Priestley, in the first act, gives the Inspector no explicit moment of surprising the family by knowing more than they do. The level of tension in the play starts extremely low, builds gradually as the Inspector enters, and builds more as the characters come to understand the fate of Eva and their roles.
Indeed, at the end of Act One, structured by Priestley so as to end on a point of tension, we discover that it is not just Birling and Sheila, but also Gerald, who is involved in Eva Smith’s demise. The comfortable, warm atmosphere of the opening has been largely destroyed by the time the curtain comes down at the end of the act, with three people so far responsible for Eva’s fate, all responding differently. Significantly, we have little indication of where the play might go next, but the audience might predict that more family members will prove responsible for Eva’s fate as we learn what else happened to her.
The Essay on How does priestley present the inspector in the play
Priestley presents the inspector as a man who enjoys allowing people to feel intimidated by his presence. This is shown in the quote: “He creates at once an impression of massiveness, solidity and purposefulness. ” This infers that although he may not be ‘massive’, he gains satisfaction from creating an impression of this. The word ‘solidity’ implies that he is a well kept together and reliable ...
