'An Inspector Calls is full of lies and deceit.' How does Priestley expose weakness and wickedness, not only in the play but also in society?

Authors Avatar

Amin Bedri

John Loughborough School

Centre number: 12616

Candidate number: 0710

English Coursework ‘An Inspector Calls’

‘An Inspector Calls is full of lies and deceit.’ How does Priestley expose weakness and wickedness, not only in the play but also in society?

        If you were to look closely at the play and the characters you will find that weakness and wickedness features within the play. The Inspector within the play exposes the weakness and the wickedness of every character by revealing how they all contributed to Eva Smith’s death. Here J.B. Priestley is trying to convey a message to us about society in the early twentieth century. They are celebrating Sheila Birling‘s engagement to Gerald Croft, who is also there at the celebration. The Inspector Goole arrives telling them of the suicide of a young girl names Eva Smith. At first they reject any understanding of the girl, but as the play goes on the Inspector succeeds to divulge that they all helped kill Eva Smith. This spectacular play was first acted out in 1945, and was set in 1912 before the world war. J.B. Priestley is the man who wrote ‘An Inspector Calls’ and revealed a story that we can all learn from. The characters that I will be focusing on are Mr Birling, Mrs Birling and Sheila.

The play opens with a conversation between Mr Birling and his family and Gerald Croft. Firstly Mr. Birling is a conceited and wealthy factory owner. He seems to be a pretentious hard headed guy. He owns a business and he is more concerned with his high profits than the interest of his workers. He pays his employees no more and no less than the going rate. He is selfish and self-righteous. I think J.B. Priestley has used Mr Birling as a good representation of an average, upper middle class man would be like.

Mr Birling‘s attitude towards the industry forms the concept of his ‘one man for himself‘ theory. Mr Birling believes “a man has to make his own way, has to look after himself and his family too”.

Mr Birling begins into a speech on community, he starts saying “the ways some of these cranks talk and write now you’d think everyone has to look after everybody else, as if we were all mixed up together like bees in a hive- community and all that nonsense”. The Inspector enters at this point because he is there to contradict Birling’s point. He finds it hard to resist talking about his business ideas, even when celebrating his daughter‘s engagement. He admits to denying her a small wage increase ”because we‘d have added twelve per cent to our labour costs". In these days there were no trade unions for workers to express their views and Mr Birling, who believes workers should know their place, thought Eva Smith had ”far too much to say”.

Join now!

The immense down fall on his personality is that he seems to show no guilt or remorse towards Eva. He seems to be a very hard man, and shows no regret for dismissing Eva, knowing that if he had not sacked Eva she might of still been breathing. He merely stated that, “If you don’t come down sharply on some of these people they will soon be asking for the earth”. The Inspector there shows Mr Birling’s wickedness that was expressed towards Eva.

Mr Birling always seems to want his own way by emphasising his status in society or whom ...

This is a preview of the whole essay