J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls

J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls

The play “an inspector calls” was written by J.B.Priestly in 1945.

The play is set in 1912 two years before the first world war, it is

about a family known as the Birlings who are a well respected middle

class family of their time.

At the beginning of the play, the Birlings and Gerald croft are having

a celebration in the Birlings household in the dining room. They are

celebrating the engagement of Sheila Birling of Birling company and

Gerald Croft of Crofts limited. Everyone at the Birling household is

enjoying themselves but then the celebrations are interrupted by a

phony police officer who went by the name of “Inspector Goole”. He

went on to tell the other characters that a woman had committed

suicide and to how they all are linked to her death. The inspector

tries to make the characters feel responsible for her death by showing

how they negatively affected her life.

Mr. Birling’s comments about society are ironic in the light of what

happens next in the play because Birling gives Eric and Gerald a

lecture about how a man should look after himself and his family “no

one else, and forget about community, a man has to make his own way

–had to look after himself-and his family too” “the way some of these

cranks talk and write now, you’d think everybody has to look after

everybody else”

Inspector Goole shows Mr. Birling that Eva Smith’s suicide is the

outcome of people not looking after each other in one big community.

He does this by presenting to each member of the Birling family and

Gerald Croft times when they came in contact with Eva Smith and acted

negatively towards her for example when Mrs. Birling refused to help

her when she most needed help, when she was pregnant with a child and

not a penny to her name. Also when Mr. Birling fires her from her job

for asking for a pay rise, “they wanted the rates raised so that they