Grade 9 Notes: An Inspector Calls
These are exam-focused notes: every point is an argument you can use, tied to a quotation you can learn. Start with what your exam is actually testing, revise one character or theme at a time, learn the quote bank, then test yourself against the essay plans at the end.
Character studies
Arthur Birling
The arch-capitalist Priestley builds the play to demolish
Birling is a 'heavy-looking, rather portentous man' — a self-made manufacturer obsessed with profit, status and his coming knighthood. Priestley's purpose for Birling is to excoriate (fiercely criticise) capitalism and the irresponsibility of the wealthy: he satirises Birling so thoroughly that to laugh at Birling is to laugh at the ideology he stands for. Crucially, Birling is a microcosm (a small-scale model) of Edwardian capitalism itself: short-sighted, self-congratulating, and blind to the collapse coming towards it.
Inspector Goole
Priestley's mouthpiece — part policeman, part prophet, part conscience
The Inspector is in complete control of the play from the moment he enters, while saying comparatively little: he is sententious — his words are few, weighty and precisely aimed. He is Priestley's mouthpiece, embodying socialist ideals and the critique of capitalism; he empowers the young (giving Sheila and Eric the confidence to speak), dismantles the old, and leaves before the play ends because his true work — making the family judge themselves — is complete. His name, homophonic with 'ghoul', keeps a deliberate supernatural shimmer around him that the final phone call never fully explains.
Sybil Birling
The cold heart of the upper class — charity without compassion
Mrs Birling is 'a rather cold woman and her husband's social superior' — the highest-born Birling and the Inspector's strongest, most defended opponent. She represents the privileged class's institutionalised lack of compassion: she runs a charity yet acts as an arbiter (a judge) of who 'deserves' help, with class prejudice as her criterion. She is the one character who never wavers and never learns — and Priestley makes her unshakeability the most damning exhibit in the play.
Sheila Birling
From sheltered child to the Inspector's proxy — the play's proof that change is possible
Sheila makes the longest journey in the play: from a 'pretty girl in her early twenties, very pleased with life and rather excited' — engaged, indulged, speaking like a child — to the family's sharpest moral intelligence. Priestley uses her to represent the younger generation's open mind and capacity to change; by Act 3 she has internalised the Inspector so completely that she continues his work after he leaves. Her genuine guilt (she had Eva sacked from Milwards out of jealousy) matters: Priestley's hope is not innocence but the honest ownership of guilt.
Gerald Croft
The charming aristocrat who almost changes — and chooses not to
Gerald Croft — 'the easy well-bred young man-about-town', son of Sir George and Lady Croft — sits between the generations by age but chooses the old order by conviction. He is the play's most complex moral case: his treatment of Daisy Renton mixed genuine kindness with genuine exploitation, he shows real feeling at her death ('distressed', leaving to walk alone) — and then he architects the family's escape, disproving 'the Inspector' instead of examining himself. Priestley uses him to expose the illusion of decency: charm, honesty and even kindness that never convert into changed behaviour.
Eric Birling
The guilty son whose confession becomes the play's rawest indictment
Eric is introduced 'not quite at ease, half shy, half assertive' — an outsider inside his own family, drinking too much and hiding it, unfitted for the confidence his father demands and the innocence his mother assumes. His story is the play's darkest: drunk, he forced himself into Eva's lodgings, made her pregnant, and stole from his father's office to support her — and she refused the stolen money. Yet Priestley builds from this material the play's second conversion: Eric ends the play owning everything, accusing his parents to their faces, and standing with Sheila for the changed generation.
Eva Smith / Daisy Renton
The absent centre — never on stage, in every scene
Eva Smith never appears, never speaks, and is the play's most important presence. Factory worker sacked for asking a living wage; shop assistant sacked for a customer's jealousy; 'Daisy Renton' kept and left; prey of the Palace bar; supplicant refused by the charity committee; suicide by disinfectant. Priestley builds her from the testimony of the people who destroyed her — and gives her, in every episode, more moral courage than any of them: she leads the strike, she refuses stolen money, she refuses a loveless marriage, she protects Eric even in her final application by (in Mrs Birling's account) telling scrupulous truth. Her absence is the point: the working class has no voice in the rooms where its fate is decided.
Thesis statements
- Priestley builds Birling's authority only to interrupt it — by doorbell, by Inspector, by history itself — so that the collapse of one man's confidence becomes the collapse of a class's creed.
- The Inspector is less a character than a verdict: Priestley engineers a figure on whom class weapons misfire, so the audience watches an entire social order discover its currency is worthless.
- Sheila's development is written into the play's grammar — from exclamation to question to confession — making her the proof that the Inspector's lesson is learnable and the standard by which the unchanged are condemned.
- Eva Smith's absence is the play's loudest device: denied a voice by society, she is denied one by the form, and the audience is made to perform the act of imagination the Birlings refused.
- The double ending converts a whodunnit into a moral time-loop: the question the play plants is not 'who was he?' but 'what will you do the second time?' — asked of the Birlings and the audience alike.
- Gerald Croft is the play's subtlest indictment: real kindness and real feeling that change nothing prove Priestley's target is not cruel men but a system whose best behaviour is still exploitation.
- Mrs Birling's defeat is self-inflicted by design: Priestley lets rigid class certainty build its own trap, showing that the ideology of 'deserving' judgement destroys even the family it exists to protect.
- The play's staging argues its politics: one sealed room, re-lit 'brighter and harder', invaded twice by ringing — Priestley makes the set itself dramatise inspection breaking into privilege.
Essay plans
- How does Priestley present Mr Birling? — Birling is engineered for demolition: Priestley grants him the platform, the confidence and the idiom of 1912 capitalism precisely so that dramatic irony, interruption and his own vocabulary can dismantle them in front of us.
- How does Priestley explore responsibility in An Inspector Calls? — The play is a trial of two creeds — 'mind his own business' against 'members of one body' — with the chain of confessions as evidence and the double ending as a verdict deferred to the audience.
- How does Priestley present the younger and older generations? — Priestley divides the stage by capacity to change, not by age alone: the young learn, the old cannot, and Gerald — young in years, old in allegiance — proves the divide is a moral choice.
- What is the significance of the Inspector's final speech and exit? — The final speech converts the play's form — whodunnit summing-up into sermon into prophecy — and the early exit hands judgement to the family and the audience: the speech is the play's thesis, the exit its method.