Education

Whether you are a teacher or a student we hope you find the following links and information stimulating and useful.

Should you wish a member of The Society to visit your school or college and give a presentation about Priestley’s life and work then please contact us at m.nelson928@btinternet.com

J.B. Priestley’s famous play, An Inspector Calls is a set text at GCSE level. What follows will provide some interesting background information about the play, its history, the political and social factors that shaped Priestley and its writing and The Royal National Theatre’s groundbreaking production.

To download a free Resource Pack for teachers click here: www.aninspectorcalls.com/#/education/

For activities around the play click here: www.teachit.co.uk/index.asp?CurrMenu=20&T=348#348

To download past paper essay questions click here.

The Play

The play is the story of the wealthy middle class industrialist Arthur Birling, his wife Sybil, son Eric, daughter Sheila and her fiancé Gerald Croft.  As they celebrate Sheila and Gerald’s engagement they are visited by the mysterious Inspector Goole who forces them to examine their responsibility in the sacking, pregnancy and suicide of a young girl called Eva Smith.  

The action of the play is set in 1912 before the outbreak of the first world war. Because it was written at the end of the second world war in 1944 it offers a clear comparison of the world at these two crucial moments in history. In 1944 people were questioning whether they wished to return to a world of Edwardian style values or break out and create a new world. Priestley was one of the foremost advocates of political and social change from the 1930s right up to the end of the second world war. 

The Inspector is the central figure in the play. You may wish to ask yourself who he is and where he comes from. The widely held belief is that he has come back in time from 1944 to try and give the Birlings the opportunity to share their guilt, accept responsibility and change and improve the spiral of their lives.

History

Priestley wrote the play in one week in the autumn of 1944. After failing to find a suitable theatre in London he sent a copy of the script to Moscow. As a result it was first produced by Tairov’s Kamerny and The Leningrad Theatre Company simultaneously in Moscow in 1945. It was a huge success and a European tour followed. At last it reached London and was produced at The New Theatre in October 1946 with Alec Guinness as Eric Birling and Ralph Richardson as The Inspector.

Since these early productions the play has been produced all over the world and in many languages.  A staple of repertory, the play was revived and reinvented by Stephen Daldry and the Royal National Theatre in the early 1990s. It is now regarded as one of the greatest plays of the Twentieth Century - a play with a simple, timeless and universal message.

The Royal National Theatre’s groundbreaking production has won more awards than any other stage play; has made more money than any other stage play and made its director Stephen Daldry a wealthy man and a star. For more information about the production go to www.aninspectorcalls.com

Influences, Political and Social Background

Born in Bradford in 1894 Priestley was a reforming patriot who had an instinctive understanding of the less fortunate and believed passionately in social justice. He was never a member of a political party, but described himself as more or less a left-wing intellectual and a socialist of the old style.

Three factors were vital in his upbringing. Firstly living in Bradford he saw at first hand the consequence of a class of people working long underpaid hours, living in squalid, crowded housing along dirty streets. Of Bradford he once wrote ‘I watched the smoke thicken and the millionaires who made it ride away. I saw broken old women creep back to the mills, and young men wither because there was no work for them to do and nobody wanted them. I saw the saddest waste of all, the waste of human life’.

The second great influence on the young Priestley was his father. Jonathan Priestley was a pioneering school teacher who believed that helping the less fortunate was no act of duty, but a moral obligation - a way of life.  As Headmaster of Green Lane Elementary School he administered the first free school meals in the country. His school also provided free milk, free medicals and had the first school baths in the UK. Jonathan Priestley inspired his son to be honourable, brave, hard working, unselfish and public-spirited.

The Great War 1914-1918 was the huge transforming event of Priestley’s life. Before enlisting his dream was to be a local writer and live in a cottage on the moors close to Bradford. The war changed all this. He saw at first-hand what the Inspector meant by men being taught a lesson in ‘fire and blood and anguish’. He lost virtually all of his friends in the war and emerged from it with a deep-rooted class consciousness. He blamed the officer class and believed till the day he died that the lies told to make young men enlist and the war strategies of the generals were responsible for the deaths of so many. In 1962 he wrote: ‘I still feel today and must go on feeling until I die, the open wound, never to be healed, of my generation’s fate, the best sorted out and slaughtered... The tradition of an officer class, defying both imagination and common sense, killed most of my friends as surely as if those cavalry generals had come out of the chateau with polo mallets and beaten their brains out. Call this class prejudice if you like, so long as you remember that I went into that war without any such prejudice, free of any class feeling. No doubt I came out of it with a chip on my shoulder; a big heavy chip, probably some friend’s thigh-bone.’

By the 1930s and having become a best-selling author Priestley turned his attention to Social issues. He was one of the first authors to tour the depressed areas of the country. His book English Journey (1934) influenced an entire generation and helped formulate a public consensus for social change that led ultimately to the 1942 Beveridge Report; the great reforming Labour Government of 1945; the foundation of the NHS; and the creation of the welfare state.  Priestley was a also an advocate for the formation of a United Nations and equal rights for women.

During The Second World War and just prior to the writing of An Inspector Calls Priestley also became the voice of the people through his famous Postscript radio broadcasts. Around 14 million people tuned in to listen to him on a Sunday evening. In these talks he began to paint a vision of a better world to come once the righteous war was over. He wanted a land fit for heroes, not the sort of world he’d returned to as a survivor of the first world war.

Central Themes

Priestley had a clear aim when writing the play. Firstly he wished to entertain the audience; secondly he wished to get across the central theme of responsibility. The message is clear and simple: if individuals behave more responsibly towards each other then the world can be a better place for all. Each of the Birling family is responsible in pushing Eva Smith towards suicide.

He advocates clearly that responsibility begins at home with individuals.  If individuals take responsibility for their actions then this will fan out into Society and collective action can make the lives of people better and war can be prevented.  

We now live in a very individualistic consumer-driven Society. It is worth thinking about the two quotations below. They show a clear difference in thinking between what the world was like in 1944/5, what it has grown into today and what it was like in Edwardian times.

There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.
Margaret Thatcher

I could not be entirely serious about anything, except the well being of our society itself.
J.B. Priestley

For more details about the central theme of responsibility click this link:

www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/english_literature/dramainspectorcalls/4drama_inspector_themerev1.shtml

The other theme of the play is time. Priestley was influenced by the Russian mystic philosopher Peter Ouspensky 1878-1947. Ouspensky believed in the theory of eternal recurrence. This is a theory that holds to the concept that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur in a self-similar form an infinite number of times. In other words everything happens again and again and again. Ouspensky believed that our time on the planet was spent travelling along an ever-recurring spiral and that the aim of all individuals should be to change and improve this spiral and stop making the same old mistakes.  In all our lives we are presented with opportunities to learn and change and therefore swing out in a new direction.  The Inspector comes back from the future or from some place outside time to offer the Birlings an opportunity to change – an opportunity they appear not to take. In the end they have learned nothing and so will have to go through it all over again.

For more information about Peter Ouspensky click here: www.ouspensky.info

There is so much that can be written about this play. We hope that this information and directed links have been helpful.