1. Inspector Calls Revision

2. What about when they are interviewed? What about after he leaves?
Key questions:
What do the characters believe/reveal about class/responsibility/gender at the start of the play?
What about when they are interviewed?
What about after he leaves?
Why does Priestley include them in the text?
What role do they play in teaching Priestley’s messages about Responsibility/class/gender?

3. What was Priestley’s view on:
Class
The treatment of the poor
Socialism
Mill Owners
Respectability

4. Birling
‘community and all that nonsense’ ‘working together-for lower costs and higher prices’ ‘a man has to mind his own business and look after his own’… hard headed business man’ ‘I refused. Of course’ ‘I was quite justified.’ ‘I only did what any other employer would have done.’ ‘I’d give thousands, yes thousands’ ‘there’ll be a public scandal’ ‘It makes all the difference.’ ‘a lot of moonshine’ and states ‘you’ll have a good laugh over it yet.’

5. Mrs Birling ‘A rather cold woman and her husband’s social superior’
‘I don’t think we can help you much.’
‘a girl of that sort’ ‘Girls of that class’
‘Brumley Women’s Charity Organisation’…who’ve in her words ‘done a great deal for deserving cases’
‘I used my influence to have it refused’
‘you’re quite wrong to suppose I regret what I did’
and ‘she was claiming elaborate fine feelings and scruples that were simply absurd in a girl in her position.’
‘he should be dealt with very severely’
she says ‘of course it does’ make a difference (he isn’t real)
‘they’re just overtired. In the morning they’ll be as amused as we are.’

6. Sheila
‘a pretty girl in her early twenties, very pleased with life and rather excited.’
’except for all last summer, when you never came near me’
when she sees her picture ‘she looks at it closely, with a little cry, gives a half-stifled sob, and then runs out.’
‘went to the manager of Milwards and I told him that if they didn’t get rid of that girl, I’d never go near the place again and I’d persuade mother to close our account.’
‘If she’d have been some miserable plain little creature, I don’t suppose I’d have done it.’
‘But these girls aren’t cheap labour- they’re people’
they must not ‘build up a kind of wall’ between them and Eva.
‘you don’t seem to have learnt anything’ (Sheila) ‘you’re beginning all over again to pretend that nothing much has happened,’

7. Eric
‘you’re squiffy’
‘His whole manner of handling the decanter and then the drink shows his familiarity with quick heavy drinking’
‘not quite at ease, half shy, half assertive.’
‘Not the kind of father a chap could go to when he’s in trouble’
‘I was in that state when a chap easily turns nasty- and I threatened to make a row’
‘and that’s when it happened. And I didn’t remember that’s the hellish thing’
‘I wasn’t in love with her or anything-but I liked her’
you killed her-and the child she’d have had to-my child- your own grandchild’
‘I did what I did. And mother did what she did. And the rest of you did what you did to her.’

8. Gerald ‘very much the man about town’
‘We’re all respectable citizens and not criminals’
responding to her look ‘that was nothing less than a cry for help’
‘I want you to understand that I didn’t install her there so I could make love to her’
‘I suppose it was inevitable’
‘I didn’t feel about her as she felt about me.’
‘it wasn’t disgusting’….’I became at once the most important person in her life’…’Daisy knew it was going to come to an end’
‘I’d like to be alone for a while’
‘That man wasn’t a police officer’
‘Everything’s alright now’

9. Eva ‘Burnt her insides out’
‘She lies with a burnt out inside on a slab’
‘A good worker too. In fact, the foreman there told me he was ready to promote her’
All the things the various people did to her!
‘quite different’ from the other girls in the palace bar
‘just to make it last longer’ (relationship with Gerald)
Goes for help because the father was ‘silly and wild and drinking too much’ and that she ‘didn’t want to take stolen money’
‘One Eva Smith has gone-but there are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, and what we say and do’

10. Inspector
‘he creates at once a sense of massiveness, solidarity and purposefulness’
‘Burnt her insides out of course’…very blunt! ‘It’s my duty to ask questions’
‘I don’t play golf’
‘it’s better to ask for the earth rather than to take it.’
Gerald comments they’re all respectable citizens and he replies: ‘Sometimes there isn’t as much difference as you would think.’
Sheila comments she should have helped and if she could change it she would. He interrupts ‘Yes but you can’t. It’s too late. She’s dead.’
Sheila comments that the inspector ‘somehow he makes you’ confess and ‘he knows, of course he knows’
‘Your daughter isn’t living on the moon.’
‘public men, Mr Birling, have responsibilities as well as privileges’
‘One person and one line of inquiry at a time’
(cutting in)
You’ll be able to divide the responsibility between you when I’ve gone.’
‘there are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us’
‘in fire and blood and anguish’

11. Family relationships
‘the general effect is substantial and comfortable and old-fashioned but not cozy and homelike’
‘lower costs and higher prices’
Treats her daughter as a child…which the Inspector challenges stating that Sheila isn’t living ‘on the moon’
They try to protect Sheila by not letting her hear the conversations which the inspector challenges
ironic as Sheila is the only one with any sense of regret and realisation that Eric is the father she says ‘you’re behaving like a hysterical child tonight.’
Eric declares he slept with Eva again but he didn’t love her Birling says (harshly) So you had to go to bed with her?
He also rebukes Eric more for the money than the death of Eva ‘you’ll work for nothing’
He tries to escape blame ‘There’s every excuse for both what your mother and I did.’
Mrs Birling ‘they’re just overtired. In the morning they’ll be as amused as we are.’
‘I’m quite ashamed of you’ she declares to Eric.
Unaware of the realities of their family: ‘he has steadily been drinking for the last two years now.’