Priestley, Time, and ‘An Inspector Calls’

First published 2023

Time is an important theme in ‘An Inspector Calls’. The playwright J.B. Priestley was believed to have been very interested in the concept of time and its effects on people. In the 1930s and early 40s, he wrote a number of plays that were influenced by the time theories of J.W. Dunne and P.D. Ouspensky. These particular works have come to be known as Priestley’s ‘Time Plays’, and were very successful on stage.

‘An Inspector Calls’ is perhaps the most famous of the Time Plays. Priestley wrote the play for an audience coming out of the horrors of the Second World War, yet he set the play in 1912. As the curtain falls at the end of Act Three, we are left with a sense that the events are going to start all over again. Consequently, we are left wondering whether things will be different the second time around.

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This fundamental idea – that the characters will re-live the events of the past few hours – is associated with Ouspensky’s Theory of Eternal Recurrence. Ouspensky (1878-1947) proposed that when we die, we are reborn into our life once more from the beginning. He suggested that we are caught up in an ever-repeating cycle of death and re-birth into the same life, and the only way we can break this cycle is by doing things differently, improving ourselves in some moral or spiritual way. Ouspensky believed that by making such improvements, we could escape from the cycle and be born into a new life in which we did not repeat our mistakes. In ‘An Inspector Calls’, the Inspector encourages each of the characters to reflect on how their morally dubious behaviour drove Eva Smith to suicide. He reminds them that there are ‘millions and millions and millions’ of people just like Eva Smith still alive, with ‘their hopes and fears…and chance of happiness all intertwined with our lives’. Implicit in his speech is the message that they must change their ways and learn the lessons of the past few hours. However, only the younger Birlings are prepared to recognise their mistakes and change for the better. Consequently, as the curtain falls at the end of the play, the family as a whole are faced with the prospect of re-living the dreadful events of the evening. 

‘An Inspector Calls’ also features elements of the Theory of Serialism, a concept proposed by the British philosopher John William Dunne in the late 1920s. In his essay ‘An Experiment with Time’ (1927), Dunne argued that all moments in time are taking place at once, at the same time. In other words, the past, the present and the future are all occurring simultaneously and not in a linear, progressive fashion like traditional accounts suggest. According to Dunne, we cannot experience time like this in normal, waking life – we are restricted by human consciousness, which prevents us from perceiving things at anything other than a fixed rate. Dunne went on to suggest that when we are asleep, we are no longer restricted by consciousness, and can see both past and future events in dreams. More importantly, we can see the consequences of our actions, presenting us with the opportunity to change those actions and therefore avoid the consequences.  

Dunne’s ideas are tied in with the concept of precognition, or the ability to see future events before they occur. Scientists argue that no one possesses true precognitive ability; we cannot ‘see into the future’ because that would go against the basic principle of cause and effect. However, Dunne postulated that he himself had experienced precognitive dreams; in other words, he believed that he had seen future events whilst he was asleep, such as the eruption of a volcano on the island of Martinique in 1902. Dunne also went on to suggest that precognitive dreams led to the phenomenon known as deja vu in waking life.      

The playwright J.B. Priestley was believed to have been very interested in how these ideas could be depicted on the stage. His 1937 play, ‘Time and the Conways’ could be described as a dramatic representation of the theory of serialism; at the end of the first act, the protagonist Kay Conway slips into a kind of dream-like state and has a vision of the future. Thus, the second act takes places eighteen years later; the characters’ lives have all failed in different ways, and it is not until we return to 1919 in Act Three that we see how the seeds of their downfall were being sown even then.   

In ‘An Inspector Calls’, the characters are all offered the opportunity to see the consequences of their actions, but unlike Kay Conway, they do not enter into a dream-like state at the end of the first act. It is the Inspector who, in arriving before Eva Smith’s suicide becomes a reality, provides each character with the chance to see how their behaviour will lead to the death of a fellow human being. However, only Eric and Sheila seem prepared to act upon this important insight; the others do not. Thus, the play concludes with an inescapable sense of deja vu: a young girl has committed suicide, and a police inspector is on his way to the house to investigate her death.  

Priestley wrote ‘An Inspector Calls’ in 1944, shortly before the end of World War Two. However, the action takes place in 1912, prior to the sinking of the Titanic and two years before the onset of the First World War. In 1912, King George V was on the throne, but Edwardian-style values were still deeply embedded into British society. People were categorised according to social class, and gender roles seemed largely inflexible. However, the political and economic landscape of Britain evolved massively between 1912 and 1944: hundreds of thousands of British men were forced to mix with one another in the trenches, eroding the boundaries between social classes. Furthermore, as a result of two world wars, women earned a more valued place in society. With fewer men in the national workforce, women were called upon to fill traditionally male occupations, such as mechanics, tram driving and working in munitions factories.   

By setting ‘An Inspector Calls’ in 1912, Priestley offered his post-war audience an opportunity to reflect upon the considerable social and economic changes that had taken place. The end of the second World War marked a major turning point in British history, and people were questioning whether it was appropriate to effectively turn back the clock and return to a world of Edwardian-style values or embrace a new way of thinking about people and society. If we think of the play in terms of Dunne’s theory, the Inspector offers the Birling family a glimpse into their future. For the post-war audience, however, it was essentially a window to the past, one that did not seek to disguise the stark social inequalities of Edwardian Britain. Through the medium of theatre, Priestley encouraged people to seize the opportunity for long-term and far-reaching social change. He had experienced first-hand the ‘fire and blood and anguish’ of the First World War, only to see Europe descend into further devastating conflict some twenty-one years later. With this in mind, the deeper significance of the Inspector’s final speech becomes clear. On the surface, the Birlings are issued with a profound moral message about community and responsibility. However, on a more fundamental level, the Inspector’s speech appears to represent an appeal from the playwright himself, calling for Britain to build a better, fairer society and not to go back in time.

To What Extent is ‘An Inspector Calls’ a Product of its Time?

First published 2021

All great literature is produced within a particular socio-historical context and ‘An Inspector Calls’ is no exception. First produced in Moscow of 1945, it is a play about a wealthy English family – the Birlings – enjoying a night of celebration before the unexpected appearance of Inspector Goole. The Inspector is an enigmatic and mysterious character who systematically reveals how the Birlings’ selfish actions have led to a young girl’s tragic suicide. Beneath the surface, ‘An Inspector Calls’ is very much a morality play, bound up in the conflicting ideals of capitalism and socialism. Several theorists have argued that the play is essentially an allegory on the evils of capitalism and the economic class system, a particularly significant issue prior to the onset of World War One. This being said, and perhaps on account of its position as one of Priestley’s great morality plays, ‘An Inspector Calls’ is also timeless, with a message just as relevant in the twenty-first century as it was in 1945.

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‘An Inspector Calls’ is set in the late Edwardian era, in the year 1912. We can place the action as occurring shortly before the Titanic’s maiden voyage, for as the 1940s audience would have known, it was to end in tragedy despite the optimistic viewpoint of some that it was failsafe. Similarly, Birling’s faith in the impossibility of war is equally as obstinate. In 1912, the prospect of war between countries was not widely accepted. Birling illustrates this idea himself, referring to it as ‘a few German officers talking nonsense and a few scaremongers making a fuss about nothing’. He considers himself the authority on the subject, perhaps on account of his position in society. From the point of view of the philosopher Karl Marx, who wrote extensively on the subject of economic class in the 19^th Century, the character of Arthur Birling could be described as an archetypal member of the Bourgeoisie or ruling class. In 1912, Britain represented a strong capitalist economy, and Marx believed that in an age of capitalism, people belonged to a certain economic class according to their relationship with the means of production. Those that owned the means of production, like factory owner Arthur Birling, essentially ruled society. After the Labour victory of 1945, key industries like coal, iron and steel were nationalised by the Labour government, but before the outbreak of war in 1914, a relatively small number of capitalists like Birling owned the factories, the machines and the tools used to produce wealth. Furthermore, there was an emphasis on keeping prices high but wages low, illustrated in Birling’s explanation of Eva Smith’s sacking in Act One:

          “Well it’s my duty to keep labour costs down, and if I’d agreed
           to this demand for a new rate we’d have added about twelve
           per cent to our labour costs. Does that satisfy you?”

To a large extent, Birling is represented as the typical, greedy capitalist, unable to separate business from pleasure and to empathise with the workers he employs. In contrast, Eva Smith might be regarded as a symbol of Marx’s proletariat or working class. According to Marx, the proletariat were the workers, i.e. anyone who sold their labour in exchange for a wage. Birling describes how Eva Smith had been ‘working in one of our machine shops for over a year’ before she committed suicide, and had been in line for a small promotion. Birling’s refusal to meet his workers’ demands for a slight increase on their weekly wage was typical of many industrialists of the time. Indeed, at the time the play was set, the needs of factory workers like Eva Smith were not taken too seriously by many employers. Birling himself refers to the struggle rather derisively as ‘Capital versus Labour agitations.’ While Eva Smith’s attempt to secure a better future for herself and her fellow workers was unsuccessful, Birling is mistaken in thinking that future is entirely prosperous for capitalists such as himself. As the 1940s audience would have known, Britain was to endure two horrifying world wars, and the Labour government was to come into power in 1945, intent on bringing an ‘end to want’ and putting the key industries in the control of the state.  

The plight of Eva Smith is unfortunately representative of many working class people of the Edwardian era. In 1912, the British economy was growing. Between 1900 and 1913, for example, GDP rose by about 1.7% per year. In the same period, the British ship-building industry created about 60% of the world’s merchant ships. Birling is understandably very proud of the capitalist economy to which he belongs, referring optimistically to ‘steadily increasing progress’ in the early half of Act One. However – and in line with Marxist theory – the success of capitalists such as Arthur Birling ultimately depended on the selfish exploitation of their workers. Whilst it is unfair to say that all capitalists like Birling were tight-fisted and unsympathetic, Eva Smith’s treatment at the ruthless hands of her employer was not uncommon. At the time the play was set, wealthy employers like Birling were able to dismiss their employees without notice. A true system of social security was not to come into force until the late 1940s, leaving women like Eva Smith in a particularly difficult situation. The Inspector describes how she ended up with ‘no work, no money and living in lodgings, lonely, half-starved’ and ‘desperate’. The Inspector goes on to suggest that this was typical of ‘lots of young women’ living in ‘every big city and big town in this country.’ His ideas appear to be grounded in social reality. It has been estimated that at the turn of the Twentieth Century, twenty-five per cent of the population was living in poverty, with fifteen per cent living at subsistence level.   

If Arthur Birling and Eva Smith might be seen as representative of the ruling class and the proletariat respectively, how does the character of the Inspector reflect the play’s wider historical context? Several theorists have argued that the Inspector is essentially a mouthpiece for the playwright’s socialist views. At the time that the play was set, interest in socialism as a replacement system was increasing. Birling dismisses it as ‘community and all that nonsense’ (Act One), but by 1912, the Labour Party as we know it had already been established, and the influence of socialism on the public mindset was slowly gaining strength. For example, sales of the Clarion newspaper increased significantly when twenty-nine Labour MPs were elected in Parliament in 1906. Priestley himself has been described as a socialist. Indeed, during the Second World War, he became a BBC radio presenter and used his public position to air his views. Having fought on the front line during the Great War, he described what he had lived through as ‘huge, murderous public folly,’ and wished for greater co-operation between countries so as to avoid the outbreak of war in the future.  In 1940, Priestley suggested that a new world order could not be established unless society abandoned notions of property and power and replaced them with ideas of a global community. With this in mind, the Inspector’s final speech in Act Three takes on a new significance. Suggesting that we are all ‘members of one body’, he makes reference to the complex inter-relationship of people’s lives, promoting what is essentially a socialist viewpoint. He implies that in order for Britain to move forward, people have to work together rather than competing against each other in a capitalist economy. Failure to learn this lesson, he promises, will inevitably result in ‘Fire and blood and anguish.’       

The Inspector’s final speech was particularly relevant at the end of World War Two, when it is thought that audiences were beginning to look upon the Edwardian era through rose-tinted spectacles. Priestley may have wished to show them that a return to the capitalist, class-structured society of the Edwardian era was a big mistake. To a certain extent, the play is a reminder of the suffering endured by people like Eva Smith as a result of the capitalist practices of the wealthy and powerful. This being said, there is a timelessness about the Inspector’s final speech that makes ‘An Inspector Calls’ equally as relevant today as it was in 1945. Indeed, in his stage direction, Priestley indicates that the Inspector should be dressed in a ‘plain darkish suit of the period’, but the morality he advocates in his final speech is by no means a message for the 1940s audience alone. According to recent data published by the United Nations, an average of twenty-five thousand people – mostly children – die from starvation every single day, yet the world is richer and more productive than it has ever been in history. In 2008, the World Bank estimated that over one thousand million people in the world were living on less than $1.25 per day. The cause of such widespread poverty, argues the World Hunger Society, is the ‘ordinary operation of the economic and political systems of the world,’ where the minority of people own the majority of the resources, and tend to live well while those at the bottom barely survive. With this information in mind, the modern relevance of the Inspector’s final speech is clear. We are arguably not looking after one another. Indeed, although we are ‘members of one body’ as the Inspector suggests, we are still very far from eradicating stark social inequalities.

Links

https://www.yorknotes.com/gcse/english-literature/an-inspector-calls-2017/study/themes-contexts-and-settings/02000700_themes

Capitalism Versus Socialism in Priestley’s ‘An Inspector Calls’

First published 2021

‘An Inspector Calls’ could be regarded as a dramatic representation of the struggle between the conflicting ideologies of capitalism and socialism. The playwright JB Priestley was a socialist and believed in the fundamental rights of working people.

The play is set in 1912 and at a time of great social change in Britain. Financially, Britain was one of the most powerful capitalist economies in the world, but wealth was unevenly shared amongst its people. The 1911 Census indicates that the richest 1% of the population held approximately 70% of the nation’s wealth. In contrast, about 30% of the population lived in abject poverty. On a national level, Britain’s wealth was increasing, but the value of real wages was in decline and food prices were growing steadily. Consequently, a significant number of British workers were actually getting poorer. This gap in wealth was responsible for rising tensions within society: many business owners were determined to make more money out of their workers by keeping labour costs low, whereas an increasing number of workers were struggling to obtain higher wages through strike action.

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Priestley was concerned about the rights of workers and wished to see a fairer society emerge from the ruins of the Second World War. ‘An Inspector Calls’ was written shortly before WW2 came to an end, but Priestley chose to set the play in 1912, enabling the 1940s’ audience to look upon the inequalities of the late Edwardian era with fresh eyes. As a socialist, he did not wish for Britain to return to an age where workers’ rights were largely ignored; in his mind, this was essential if Britain was to avoid a third international conflict.

Thus, as the curtain rises at the beginning of Act One, we meet the Birlings, an upper middle class family living in the fictional town of Brumley. The head of the household, Arthur Birling, represents the greedy Capitalist business owner of the period: he is keen to see that the ‘interests of Capital are properly protected’, and believes that ‘a man has to make his own way…look after himself’. Dismissing socialist ideals as ‘community and all that nonsense’, he considers himself wholly justified in his decision to fire Eva Smith for seeking to gain higher wages for herself and her fellow workers. In this way, Priestley portrays Birling as an inherently selfish character: he is keen for his company to maximise profit, but has no intention of paying his workers any more than the ‘average’ weekly wage, regardless of how much money the company makes. His selfishness is essentially a product of the Capitalist economy in which he lives: he has worked hard to achieve his status as a business-owner, and should be entitled to keep as much of his money as possible.   

The Capital versus Labour’ dispute was one of the most important questions of the 1910s. It began in 1848 when the two German economists and philosophers, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, published a book called The Communist Manifesto. At that time, Britain and much of Europe was living in an industrial age, in which huge numbers of people worked in factories performing manual labour that was often dangerous and difficult. Many factory owners treated their workers badly. In 1912, Britain was a heavily industrialised society, and there was a great debate about balancing the need to make money – capital – with the respect and dignity of workers – labour.

Priestley attempts to show that Birling’s attitude towards labour is outdated and immoral. When the Inspector begins exposing Birling’s mistreatment of Eva Smith – he sacked her because she led a strike for higher wages – Eric comes out on the side of labour, suggesting that it is not as easy as his father thinks to find work. Soon afterwards, Sheila also demonstrates a similar point of view, suggesting that her father’s sacking of Eva Smith was “a mean thing to do’ which ‘perhaps…spoilt everything for her”. Birling regards women like Eva Smith simply as “cheap labour”, but Sheila, young, passionate and free-thinking, disagrees: “these girls aren’t cheap labour – they’re people.”

Many readers have argued that the Inspector is essentially a mouthpiece for the playwright’s political views. He forces Birling to understand the long-term consequences of his actions, and stands in contempt of Birling’s careless disregard for workers’ rights: ‘it is better to ask for the earth than to take it’. The Inspector, in his ‘massiveness’, encourages us all to think of the many ‘young women, counting their pennies in their dingy little back bedrooms’, and challenges the deeply-entrenched Capitalist viewpoint that the rights of the lowest-paid workers are unimportant. His outspokenness – an indication of his authority in the room – appears to make Birling feel threatened, as he soon makes reference to his friendship with the Chief Constable, Colonel Roberts.

In his final speech of the play, the Inspector essentially makes a case for a move towards socialism. He points out that although Eva Smith is gone, the Birlings still have an opportunity to help the ‘millions and millions and millions’ like her that are still left. In doing so, he draws our attention to scale of the working class; the Birlings are forced to acknowledge that the case of Eva Smith is not an isolated one; she is, to a large extent, representative of the 30% of people living in absolute poverty as identified in the 1911 Census. Furthermore, the Inspector highlights the need for a fundamental paradigm shift: rather than looking at the world in terms of power and ownership, Britain should start to think more in terms of community and shared responsibility. His repeated use of the pronoun ‘we’ signifies a message to the British public as a whole; it is as if the playwright himself is standing on stage, urging wealthy theatre-goers to think about how they have treated the Eva Smiths in their own lives.

Priestley also makes use of stage direction to highlight the flaws in the Capitalist system. As the beginning of the play, the lighting is ‘pink and intimate’, implying that the Birlings are choosing to look at life through rose-tinted spectacles and ignore the plight of the millions of workers struggling to survive from day-to-day. Indeed, the playwright’s use of the adjective ‘intimate’ suggests that collectively, the Birlings have no real interest in what happens beyond their social sphere. However, the lighting conditions become ‘brighter and harder’ with the arrival of the Inspector; signifying a move towards enlightenment: the Birlings’ selfish behaviour has been exposed, and they can no longer hide the truth from themselves or each other. The play ends with the younger generation accepting the need for far-reaching change, with a much greater emphasis on community and shared responsibility. 

Links

https://brooksenglishninjas.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/all-an-inspector-calls.pptx