Example Essay Answers

In the Inspector's final speech, Priestley transforms the stage from a domestic drama into a direct political address. Writing in 1945, when Britain was deciding between the Conservative promise of a return to pre-war norms and the Labour vision of a welfare state, Priestley uses the Inspector as his mouthpiece to articulate the socialist case for collective responsibility - the very argument he had been making in his popular BBC Postscripts broadcasts throughout the war.

The opening imperative, "just remember this," is significant because the adverb "just" strips away any complexity. Priestley is arguing that social responsibility is not a difficult philosophical concept but a simple moral truth that the ruling class has chosen to ignore - and this deliberate ignorance, rather than genuine misunderstanding, is what makes the Birlings culpable. The tripling of "millions and millions and millions" then forces the audience to confront the systemic scale of the problem. Priestley is not asking the audience to feel sorry for one girl; he is exposing the entire structure of Edwardian capitalism, in which the comfortable lives of the bourgeoisie were built on the exploitation of an invisible working class. The deliberate accumulation of human qualities - "their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness" - serves a specific political function: it restores individuality to the people that capitalism reduces to statistics. This directly counteracts the Malthusian language of "surplus population" that characterised Victorian and Edwardian attitudes to the poor, and which Birling echoes when he dismisses Eva as merely "cheap labour." The organic metaphor "intertwined" is Priestley's answer to Birling's earlier insistence on separation: society is not a collection of isolated units but a living system in which every action has consequences for others.

The short declarative sentences "We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other" represent the ideological heart of the play. The anaphoric "We" is deliberately inclusive - it refuses to permit the audience to position themselves as observers of the Birlings' failings rather than participants in the same social system. The metaphor "one body" carries religious connotations, echoing 1 Corinthians 12:27 and the concept of the Body of Christ, and Priestley's choice to invoke Christian language is strategic: by grounding his socialist argument in biblical imagery, he reaches beyond political affiliation to a universal moral authority that even a Conservative audience would struggle to reject. The final warning, "fire and blood and anguish," constitutes a prophetic tricolon of devastating dramatic irony. For the 1945 audience, who had lived through the trenches of the First World War and the Blitz of the Second, this is not a prophecy but a historical fact. Priestley is making the argument that these catastrophes were not random events but the direct consequences of the selfish ideology the Birlings represent - and that unless Britain chooses a different path, they will happen again.

Moreover, this speech marks a crucial break in dramatic convention. The Inspector ceases to function as a realistic character and instead addresses the audience directly, breaking the fourth wall in a technique that forces the audience out of passive entertainment into active moral reflection. Priestley is making the political personal: you cannot simply watch this play and go home unchanged.

Elsewhere in the play, Priestley establishes the ideology that this speech dismantles from the very opening. Mr Birling's declaration, "a man has to mind his own business and look after himself and his own," is not presented as one man's opinion but as the articulation of an entire class's worldview - the laissez-faire capitalism that dominated Edwardian Britain and that Priestley held directly responsible for the social conditions that led to war. The repetition of the possessive pronoun "his own" reveals how this philosophy shrinks the moral universe to the self and immediate family, rendering the suffering of others literally invisible. Priestley has already undermined Birling's credibility through dramatic irony: the prediction that the Titanic is "unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable" would have provoked immediate recognition in the 1945 audience. This is not merely a joke at Birling's expense; Priestley is making a structural argument that the confidence of the Edwardian ruling class was built on delusion, and that their certainty about economic matters deserves the same scepticism as their certainty about the Titanic.

Priestley deepens the theme of responsibility through the generational divide. Sheila's declaration, "But these girls aren't cheap labour - they're people," employs antithesis to expose how the language of capitalism dehumanises the working class by reducing individuals to economic categories. The significance of this line lies in its simplicity: Sheila states something that should be self-evident, and the fact that it needs to be stated at all is Priestley's real indictment of the Birling class. By Act 3, Sheila has assumed the Inspector's moral authority, declaring "I'm ashamed of you as well - yes both of you." Priestley constructs this role reversal - a young woman judging her own parents - as an argument about where moral authority should reside in post-war Britain: not with the old order of inherited wealth and social position, but with the generation willing to confront uncomfortable truths about their own complicity. For a 1945 audience on the verge of voting in a Labour government that would create the NHS and the welfare state, Sheila embodies the generational transformation Priestley believed was essential.

However, the older generation's refusal to accept responsibility reveals why the Inspector's warning carries such urgency. Birling's response upon learning the Inspector may not be genuine, "The whole thing's different now," demonstrates that his concern was never ethical but reputational - he cares about scandal, not about Eva Smith. Priestley uses Birling's relief to expose the fundamental moral failure of the capitalist class: they will only behave responsibly when forced to by external consequences, never from genuine conscience. The cyclical structure of the ending, in which a second inspector is announced, returns the audience to the Inspector's central ultimatum: learn the lesson voluntarily, or be taught it in "fire and blood and anguish." The play refuses its audience a comfortable resolution because Priestley's argument is that the question of social responsibility is never settled - it must be confronted by every generation, and the cost of failure is measured in human lives.

Priestley presents Mr Birling at the height of his self-assurance in Act 1, delivering a speech that encapsulates the laissez-faire capitalist ideology the play will systematically dismantle. Priestley constructs Birling not as a unique individual but as a dramatic type - a representative of the Edwardian industrialist class whose arrogance and selfishness, in Priestley's view, directly caused the social conditions that led to two World Wars. For a 1945 audience deciding between Churchill's Conservatives and Attlee's Labour, Birling is Priestley's portrait of what happens when those in power refuse to accept responsibility for those beneath them.

The speech opens with Birling's patronising appeal to "you youngsters," establishing a generational hierarchy in which age and wealth automatically confer moral authority. This is precisely the assumption Priestley's play exists to destroy. The parenthetical "I've learnt in the good hard school of experience" is a cliche that reveals Birling's intellectual poverty - he presents received wisdom as personal insight, performing authority rather than possessing it. The central declaration, "a man has to mind his own business and look after himself and his own," is not merely a personal opinion; it is the articulation of the entire capitalist philosophy that the Beveridge Report of 1942 sought to replace. The repetition of the possessive pronoun "his own" reveals how this worldview shrinks moral responsibility to the self and immediate family, rendering the suffering of the working class - the Eva Smiths and John Smiths - literally invisible. Priestley is arguing that this is not merely selfish but dangerous: it is the ideology that allowed factory owners to pay starvation wages, that allowed councils to ignore slum housing, and that ultimately allowed nations to slide into war.

The most structurally significant moment in this speech is its interruption. The stage direction "We hear the sharp ring of a front door bell" silences Birling mid-sentence - his capitalist worldview is never permitted to reach its conclusion. Priestley's structural choice here is deliberate and symbolic: the doorbell represents the arrival of social conscience, and it speaks louder than all of Birling's rhetoric. The adjective "sharp" connotes something that cuts through pretension, puncturing the "pink and intimate" atmosphere of bourgeois self-congratulation. Birling's trailing "and -" leaves his philosophy permanently incomplete, and this incompleteness is Priestley's point: individualism has no answer to the moral questions the Inspector will raise. It can only be silenced by them.

Priestley has already ensured that the audience distrusts Birling before this speech. His prediction that the Titanic is "unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable" is a masterful use of dramatic irony: the 1945 audience knows the ship sank on its maiden voyage, killing over 1,500 people. This is not merely a joke at Birling's expense - Priestley is making a structural argument. By demonstrating that Birling is catastrophically wrong about a factual matter, Priestley primes the audience to recognise that he is equally wrong about his moral philosophy. The intensifier "absolutely" compounds the irony: the more certain Birling sounds, the more deluded the audience knows him to be. Priestley follows this with "nobody wants war," another prediction the audience knows to be fatally incorrect. The cumulative effect is devastating: by the time Birling delivers this philosophy speech, his authority has already been destroyed.

Priestley further presents Birling as a man whose entire social identity is a performance. The stage directions describe him as "provincial in his speech," revealing that his upper-class manner is adopted, not natural - he is playing a role to secure social advancement. His anxiety over the port - "you ought to like this port... it's exactly the same port your father gets" - exposes a desperate need to prove himself equal to Gerald Croft's aristocratic family. This matters because Priestley is exposing the fundamental hypocrisy of the capitalist class: Birling held civic office as Lord Mayor and pursues a knighthood, yet dismisses "community and all that nonsense." His public roles were instruments of status, not expressions of duty. For a 1945 audience, this hypocrisy had a specific political resonance - it echoed the behaviour of the industrialists and politicians whom Priestley blamed for the failures of the inter-war period.

Birling's most damning characteristic is his refusal to change, which Priestley contrasts with Sheila to sharpen the play's argument about generational responsibility. Upon learning the Inspector may not be genuine, Birling responds with immediate relief: "The whole thing's different now." The adjective "different" does not indicate moral reassessment; it indicates that the threat of public scandal has been removed, and with it any motivation for self-examination. This is Priestley's diagnosis of the capitalist class: they will only behave responsibly when forced to by external consequences, never from genuine conscience. Eric's accusation, "You're not the kind of father a chap could go to when he's in trouble," exposes the personal cost of Birling's ideology - he has built a family on obedience and material provision rather than moral guidance, mirroring how the Edwardian ruling class governed: maintaining order through wealth and authority while failing to provide genuine social leadership. The cyclical ending, with a second inspector on the way, ensures that the moral test Birling failed will recur - just as his incomplete speech will echo through the play until someone finishes the sentence with the right answer.

Priestley presents Sheila's moral transformation as the central argument for change in the play. By Act 3, she ceases to be merely a character in a family drama and becomes the voice of Priestley's argument about change itself. Having progressed from the sheltered, "pleased with life" young woman of Act 1 to a figure of genuine moral authority, Sheila now directly confronts her parents' refusal to accept the lesson of the evening. Priestley, writing in 1945 when Britain was deciding whether to build a welfare state or return to pre-war norms, uses Sheila's journey to present change not as a comfortable process but as a painful and necessary confrontation with one's own complicity in injustice.

In Act 3, Sheila's accusation to her parents - "You're pretending everything's just as it was before" - reveals the depth of her transformation. The verb "pretending" carries enormous weight because it reframes her parents' denial not as ignorance but as a deliberate, conscious performance. This distinction is central to Priestley's argument about social responsibility: the Birlings are not incapable of understanding the Inspector's message - they understood it perfectly well during the evening - but they are actively choosing to reject it now that the external pressure has been removed. This is Priestley's indictment of the entire capitalist class: their moral failure is not one of understanding but of will. Eric's response, "I'm not pretending," aligns him with Sheila and reinforces the generational divide that structures the entire play, while Sheila's clarification, "No, but these two are," uses a demonstrative pronoun that creates deliberate distance - as though the moral gap between the generations has become too wide for the word "parents" to bridge. Priestley is dramatising the political argument that the younger generation must not merely inherit the old order but actively break from it.

The declarative "whoever that Inspector was, it was anything but a joke" reveals the depth of Sheila's transformation. Her moral growth exists independently of the Inspector's identity - whether he was a real police officer, a supernatural figure, or a hoax is, for Sheila, entirely immaterial, because the truth of what the family did to Eva Smith remains unchanged regardless. Priestley is making a philosophical point here about the nature of moral responsibility: it does not depend on who is watching or what the consequences might be. The triplet structure "You knew it then. You began to learn something. And now you've stopped" employs short, accusatory sentences that mirror the Inspector's own rhetorical style, suggesting that Sheila has internalised his moral framework. The verb "stopped" implies a deliberate choice to halt a process of growth, and Priestley's argument is that this wilful regression - this choosing to un-know what you have already understood - is more morally culpable than never having known at all. The phrase "the same old way" carries particular resonance for the 1945 audience: Priestley is drawing a direct parallel between the Birlings' desire to return to their pre-Inspector comfort and the broader political question of whether Britain would revert to the failed pre-war social order that had produced mass unemployment, the General Strike, and ultimately two World Wars.

Priestley carefully constructs the starting point from which this transformation is measured. The stage directions describe Sheila as "very pleased with life and rather excited" - phrases that establish her as a product of bourgeois privilege who has never needed to question the system that produced her comfort. Her engagement to Gerald is framed less as a love story than as a business transaction: Birling's "your engagement to Sheila means a tremendous lot to me" places the emphasis on "to me," revealing that Sheila's marriage serves her father's social ambitions rather than her own happiness. The opening lighting, described as "pink and intimate," functions as a visual metaphor for the entire Birling worldview: rose-tinted, warm, and fundamentally dishonest. Priestley establishes this sheltered world so precisely because the audience must understand exactly what Sheila is surrendering when she chooses moral truth over comfortable ignorance. By Act 3, she has left the "pink and intimate" world permanently - she has entered the "brighter and harder" light of moral reality, and Priestley's point is that this cannot be reversed. Once you have seen the human cost of your privilege, you cannot unsee it.

Sheila's awakening begins when she declares "But these girls aren't cheap labour - they're people." The antithesis forces the audience to confront how the language of capitalism dehumanises workers by reducing them to economic categories - "cheap labour" is not just an economic term but a moral judgement that denies individuality and human worth. Crucially, Priestley does not exempt Sheila from culpability: she too acted against Eva, having her dismissed from Milwards out of jealousy. Her acceptance of blame - "I know I'm to blame - and I'm desperately sorry" - is what distinguishes her from her parents. The adverb "desperately" connotes genuine anguish rather than performative regret, and Priestley contrasts this with Mrs Birling's sole concern about "a public scandal" to argue that authentic moral growth requires accepting guilt independently of social consequences. Sheila does not need an audience to feel remorse; her parents only care about appearances. This distinction is Priestley's central argument about the nature of change: it must come from genuine conscience, not from fear of punishment.

This Act 3 confrontation represents the culmination of this journey. Sheila has effectively become the Inspector's successor, carrying his moral authority forward after his departure and directing it at her own family. For the 1945 audience, the general election was fundamentally a choice between Birling's worldview and the Inspector's, and Sheila functions as Priestley's proof that change is possible - but only through the painful process of confronting your own complicity, accepting genuine shame, and refusing to retreat into the "same old way." The cyclical ending, with a real inspector announced, suggests that this moral test will recur until society passes it. Priestley's final question is not whether Sheila will pass it again - the audience can be confident she will - but whether they themselves will follow her example, or whether they will join the older Birlings in pretending that nothing has changed.