Mr Birling
Arthur Birling is Priestley's caricature of capitalist arrogance. A self-made industrialist, he is obsessed with social status, profit, and his potential knighthood. His confidently wrong predictions — that the Titanic is 'unsinkable' and that war is impossible — are designed to demolish his authority with the 1945 audience before the Inspector even arrives. He fired Eva Smith for leading a strike demanding fair wages, and he sees nothing wrong with this. By the end of the play, he has learned nothing — his only concern is avoiding a 'public scandal.'
Key Themes
Birling is the play's chief representative of capitalism — he champions profit over people, fires workers for demanding fair wages, and defines success in purely economic terms. His philosophy is the ideological target Priestley spends the entire play dismantling.
Birling weaponises his social status to deflect accountability, name-dropping his alderman title and potential knighthood. His power over Eva — firing her for striking — demonstrates how class hierarchy enables economic exploitation.
Birling explicitly rejects social responsibility ('a man has to look after himself'), making him the Inspector's ideological opposite. His refusal to accept any blame for Eva's death is Priestley's portrait of how capitalism trains people to deny collective duty.
Birling dismisses his children's guilt as youthful foolishness, representing the older generation's inability to learn or change. His contempt for Sheila and Eric's moral awakening highlights the generational gap Priestley sees as both a tragedy and a source of hope.
Birling's moral framework is entirely transactional — he judges actions by their business logic, not their human cost. The Inspector's judgement exposes this moral bankruptcy, and Birling's failure to change under scrutiny makes him the play's most damning example of ethical failure.
Character Arc
Dominates the dinner table with pompous speeches about business, self-reliance, and his predictions for the future. His speech about 'a man has to look after himself' establishes his philosophy before the Inspector arrives to dismantle it.
Reveals he fired Eva Smith for asking for a modest pay rise. He justifies this as 'standard business practice' and refuses to accept any responsibility. When challenged, he invokes his status: 'I was an alderman for years — and Lord Mayor two years ago.'
As the Inspector exposes each family member, Birling's concern is not moral but reputational. He worries about scandal, his knighthood, and social standing. When the Inspector is revealed as possibly fake, he is relieved rather than reflective.
Immediately tries to minimise the damage and celebrate the Inspector's apparent fraudulence. He has learned nothing. The final phone call — announcing a real inspector is on the way — hits him hardest because it threatens public exposure, not because he has grown morally.
Key Quotes
“A man has to mind his own business and look after himself and his own.”
Act 1
This is the play's ideological thesis statement for capitalism — and Priestley structures the entire drama to prove it catastrophically wrong. 'His own' defines responsibility narrowly (family and self), rejecting the wider community the Inspector champions. The audience, knowing two World Wars resulted from such insularity, recognises the fatal arrogance.
Theme Links
This quote is the capitalist creed the entire play sets out to dismantle. Birling's insistence on self-interest as a virtue directly contradicts the Inspector's collectivist message that 'we are responsible for each other.'
Birling explicitly rejects social responsibility, defining duty only in terms of self and family. Priestley structures the play to prove that this narrow definition of responsibility produces suffering and death.
The audience is invited to judge Birling's moral philosophy as catastrophically wrong — dramatic irony ensures they already know his confident worldview led to two World Wars.
“The Titanic — she sails next week — forty-six thousand eight hundred tons — New York in five days — and every luxury — and unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable.”
Act 1
Priestley uses dramatic irony to destroy Birling's credibility before the Inspector arrives. The 1945 audience knows the Titanic sank. Every confident claim Birling makes is wrong, training the audience to distrust everything he says — including his moral philosophy.
Theme Links
The Titanic — a symbol of capitalist excess and misplaced confidence — mirrors Birling's own worldview. His worship of material progress ('every luxury') represents the capitalist faith that Priestley demolishes through dramatic irony.
Birling's admiration for the Titanic's size and luxury reveals his equation of wealth with invulnerability. The audience knows the Titanic's class system meant steerage passengers died while first-class passengers were saved, making this a microcosm of class injustice.
Priestley uses Birling's confident wrongness to invite the audience to judge his entire moral framework as equally misguided. If he is wrong about the Titanic, he is wrong about everything — including his dismissal of social responsibility.
“I can't accept any responsibility. If we were all responsible for everything that happened to everybody we'd had anything to do with, it'd be very awkward, wouldn't it?”
Act 1
Birling dismisses collective responsibility as mere 'awkwardness' — trivialising a girl's death as social inconvenience. 'Very awkward' is deliberately bathetic, reducing a moral catastrophe to mild embarrassment. Priestley exposes how capitalism reframes exploitation as normality.
Theme Links
Birling reduces the entire concept of social responsibility to an 'awkward' inconvenience, revealing how the capitalist mindset trivialises moral obligation to make exploitation feel acceptable.
The dismissive tone reflects capitalism's ideological defence mechanism — reframing systemic responsibility as absurd overreach so that individual profit-seeking can continue unchallenged.
Birling's casual dismissal is only possible because of his class position. He can afford to find responsibility 'awkward' because he will never be the one who suffers from its absence — that burden falls on people like Eva.
Key Relationships
They embody the play's central conflict: individualism vs collectivism. The Inspector systematically strips away Birling's status, authority, and self-justification. Birling's attempts to intimidate the Inspector ('I was an alderman') are ineffective, revealing that moral authority trumps social rank.
His children's willingness to accept responsibility highlights his refusal. The generational divide is Priestley's hope: the older generation may be irredeemable, but the younger generation can build a better society. Birling's dismissal of his children's guilt ('the famous younger generation who know it all') reveals his contempt for moral growth.
They form a united front of upper-class complacency. Both refuse to accept responsibility, both prioritise reputation over morality, and both try to exploit the Inspector's possible fraudulence to escape accountability. Their shared stubbornness makes Sheila and Eric's moral awakening all the more powerful by contrast.
Writer’s Methods
Priestley uses Birling as a dramatic irony machine: every prediction he makes is wrong, conditioning the audience to reject his worldview. His monologues in Act 1 are deliberately long-winded and pompous, using the stage as a lecture platform that the Inspector will commandeer. The lighting shift when the Inspector arrives visually represents Birling's comfortable delusions being stripped away. Priestley also uses Birling's obsession with social hierarchy — name-dropping, referencing his potential knighthood — to expose the transactional nature of capitalist respectability.
Grade 7+ Point
WOWBirling can be read as a Marxist archetype of the bourgeoisie — the capitalist class whose wealth depends on exploiting labour (Eva's cheap wages) while maintaining an ideology of meritocracy ('I started from nothing'). His inability to change despite overwhelming evidence mirrors Marx's concept of false consciousness: he cannot see the system's injustice because he benefits from it. Priestley's 1945 audience, having just elected a Labour government, would have recognised Birling as the very mindset they were voting to replace.
Key Vocabulary
An economic system based on private profit and individual self-interest
When the audience knows something a character does not
The wealthy, property-owning class in Marxist theory
Excessive pride or self-confidence that leads to downfall
Intended to teach or instruct — the play has a clear moral message
Exam Tip
AOBirling is a gift for AO3 (context). Always link his wrong predictions to the 1912/1945 time gap — Priestley deliberately sets the play in 1912 so the audience can see how catastrophically wrong Birling's confident worldview turned out to be. This structural choice *is* the argument.