J. B. Priestly was born in Bradford in 1894. He fought in the First World War. His novels, The Good Companion and Angel Pavement announced him as a successful writer. He penned several plays, including An Inspector Calls in 1947. He died in 1984, aged 90. Throughout his life, J. B. Priestly was a committed Socialist and he was also interested and fascinated by the passage of time.
In An Inspector Calls we meet the Birling family and Gerald Croft who are celebrating an engagement when they are interrupted by a police inspector who wants to ask them some questions about a mysterious and gruesome suicide. What follows is an unlikely chain of events as each character is linked to the dead girl in a way that could cause them trouble, and then we have a final dramatic twist. This play shows the difference in society in 1912, how people were expected to help only their families. If you were poor, then it was your own fault. This play shows how the playwright believed that Socialism and helping others was the way forward.
Priestly uses this play to convey his message of socialism and unity within the community. He uses the effects of mystery and suspense to captivate the attention of his audience. This is good because it allows Priestly to preach his message to an audience that are fully concentrating on the words of the play. Because all the events of the play take place within the dining room of the Birling family’s house, it keeps the focus of the play on the characters and dialogue so the audience build up a sort of relationship with each one of the characters. The action of the play runs continuously throughout all 3 acts and this is useful because it keeps the focus on the play and its message. The Inspector enters quite early on and one of his first lines is “I’d like some information” so he is getting straight to the point of the play. This has the effect of keeping the audience’s attention on the twist and turns and fluctuations of the plot, the audience will also be more sensitive to the drama and tension. The action of the play also moves forward as the Inspector questions each character Priestly has structured the plot so that as characters enter and leave something new is revealed. Such as when Gerald goes for a walk, he returns and has worked out that there is no Inspector Goole at Brumley Police Station and when this is confirmed by Mr. Birling’s phone call, the older characters begin to breathe a sigh of relief, that there will be no polic investigation or public scandal after all, that Mr. Birling my still get his knighthood. They utterly forget that those things all still happened and that a girl is still dead anyway and four others have suffered because of them. This is Priestly preaching his message that socialism would have helped this girl and those who believe in self-help are wrong. The older characters are the conservatives, who flatly refuse to accept any responsibility for something that has happened to someone else, Mr. Birling even says, “Still, I can’t accept any responsibility. If we were all responsible for everything that happened to everybody we’d had anything to do with, it would be very awkward, wouldn’t it?”, while Shiela and Eric accept that they did wrong and it does not matter that the girls might not be dead. Similarly, when Eric leaves the dining room and Mrs. Birling is being questioned by the Inspector, Priestly constructs the scene so that Mrs. Birling utterly condemns her own son, saying that, “If you’d take some steps to find this young man and make sure that he’s compelled to confess in public his responsibility… then you really would be doing your duty.”, even as Shiela works out what is happening and warns her to stop. When she finds out that she was condemning her own son, Mrs. Birling instantly retracts what she was saying and instead says, “I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it…” This is effective in preach Priestly’s message because it shows that only few people benefit from self-help and that with socialism and community all can benefit.
