How Does J.B Priestley encourage an audience of An Inspector Calls to consider the issue of social responsibility?

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JUSTIN WHITEFOOT

In a Section Of Your Choice, And The Play As a Whole, How Does J.B Priestley Encourage An Audience Of An Inspector Calls To Consider The Issue Of Social Responsibility?

The setting of An Inspector Calls takes place in a dining room of a self-made business man named Mr Arthur Birling, in the backdrop of a Midlands industrial town in the year of 1912.

The plot itself involves the Birling family celebrating the engagement of Shelia Birling to Gerald Croft.

Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. Mr Birling talks of progress and makes several references that his advice is coming from that of hard-headed business man ‘And I’m talking as a hard-headed, practical man of business’. A police inspector then calls upon the Birling residents to investigate the recent suicide of Eva Smith who has just died in the infirmary. The inspector seems to know where in the chain of events of Eva Smiths life each of the members of the Birling family fell, by receiving, answers to a series of demanding questions that the inspector puts forward to them.

Priestley’s Birling’s to a degree represent a 1912’s upper-class family. This in itself is proven by historic information dating back to this era. This realism by Priestly gives this sense of belief to the audience, and, as such the audience feel almost as one with the characters as they do with themselves.

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        Priestley’s deliberate sabotage of Mr Birling’s speech is one that shows how this issue of social status stands in the mind of Birling. ‘…a man has to make his own way- has to look after himself’. Mr Birling believes in the fact that a man should be able to stand on his own two feet and look after number one then his family. Anyone who’s upper-class and cannot in the view of Birling should be ashamed. In the case of Eva Smith she’s a mere working-class peasant so doesn’t have the right to rights.

As long as the employer’s ...

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