This allows the Birlings and the audience to create sympathy with Eva, helping them to realise what it was like for a working class woman to succeed in society.
After Eva had finished with Gerald, we are told that she went to a seaside resort “to make it last longer” and she felt “ that there would never be any thing as good for her ever again”. This shows the audience that she was a smart, down-to-earth girl, who knew her position in society and realised that she would never have anything as good for her ever again, so she went to ‘savour the moment’
There is a lot of sympathy created for the working class in the play. Sheila and Eric do not agree with the pay the working class receive and the way they are treated. When Birling refused them a pay rise, he told them “It’s a free country” Eric replies and says “It isn’t if you can’t go and work somewhere else” This shows that Eric is more in touch with the different tiers in society, than Mr. Birling, who is old-fashioned and set in his ways. This also gives the audience a clearer picture of how hard it was to get a job, which creates sympathy among them. The Inspector tells Gerald and Birling than it is “better to ask for the world than to take it” which shows that the Inspector believes that Eva and her group were right to ask for a pay rise and should not have been punished for it.
Sympathy is also created when the Inspector suggests “putting ourselves in the place of these young women” because the audience immediately picture hungry, starving girls in their “dingy little back bedrooms”, “counting their pennies” and they couldn’t imagine having to live their life. Again Sheila and Eric realise that businesses abuse the working class “but these girls aren’t cheap labour, they’re people” Inspector Goole leads Sheila and Eric into saying such things. He ‘spoon-feeds’ them so he receives the response he wants, so he can build up a force against Birling. This creates sympathy, as Birling was the one that was ‘abusing’ the working class in the first place so the audience realise that everybody is ganging up on him. All through the little speeches made by the inspector about the working class, Mr. Birling is very quiet and is obviously taking it all in, and maybe secretly taking note in order to mend his ways. The audience will se Birling on stage, very quiet, and again will sympathise with the working class as they see him thinking about it and considering, possibly, how low their quality of life was.
Sheila is very ready with her answers, lets everything spill out naturally, and in fact delivers a long speech about her visit to Milwards and she even goes to the trouble of trying to remember name of her assistant “Miss Francis”. Sheila is very honest about the way she behaved “I was very rude to both of them” and is clearly very sorry for what she did “I’ll never, never do it again”. The inspector wasn’t to harsh with Sheila, he wasn’t as nasty with her as he was with the rest of the characters, probably because he knew that Sheila was regretting what she did, and was truly sorry for her actions.
Mrs Birling, on the other hand was much more awkward in questioning “and what if I was?” She would not give the inspector a straight answer to his questions and the inspector was getting quite angry “(severely) Do you want me to tell you – in plain words?” The inspector has to repeat his question several times before she would answer, “what did she reply to that…what was it…I’m losing all patience with you people, WHAT DID SHE SAY?” As the inspector becomes increasingly annoyed, he starts to lead her into landing all the blame onto Eric, with Mrs Birling not knowing. The inspector is crueller to Mrs Birling than to any other character. Sheila says he is “giving us the rope so that we will hang ourselves” This is exactly what he is doing with Mrs Birling, allowing her to dig herself deeper and deeper into the ground, without her realising until irreparable damage had been done. “So, who’s the chief culprit then?” Mrs Birling starts to blame Eric… “I blame the young man who was the father” Then she says that this young man should be “made an example of” she is now adamant that it was this boys fault and “ought to be dealt with very severely” Then the inspector breaks the news to Mrs Birling, not in a kind way at all. He was very cruel. “We know what to do don’t we? Mrs Birling has just told us.”
The moral of `An Inspector Calls’ is that no matter what class we are we are all equal and that we must work together. Priestly wanted to get this moral across, I think he did, but unfortunately there will always be people like the Birling’s.