Date: _________________________ Study Booklet An Inspector Calls Name Class Teacher 1 | P a g e Date: _________________________ Study Booklet Contents 4 Timeline of key events 5 Key vocabulary and character specific vocabulary BQ 1: What compelled Priestley to write this play? 7 Priestley’s life 12 Poverty in England BQ 2: How is the Birling household reflective of society at the time? 19 Stage Direction study 23 Capitalism and Socialism 29 Extended writing: The Birling household BQ 3: What does Arthur Birling represent? 32 The motive of the call 34 Like Bees in a Hive 37 Birling and the Inspector BQ 4: Is the Inspector omniscient? 40 Feedback and response 43 Is the Inspector omniscient? BQ 5: What drives Sheila’s behaviour? 45 Young women and marriage 47 Sheila and Gerald 48 Presentation of Sheila BQ 6: How has Gerald abused his power? 51 Gerald’s disclosure 53 Gerald and the Male Gaze 56 Gerald and Trust 58 Gerald and Honour 62 Feedback and response BQ 7: Why is Sybil disdainful of the vulnerable? 66 The symbol of the photo 68 The fallen woman 71 Girls of that class 2 | P a g e Date: _________________________ 73 Exemplar 77 Extended writing: Sybil Birling BQ 8: Is Eric immoral or a product of his upbringing? 81 Legality and morality 85 The issue of consent 89 Eric’s relationships with others 92 Exemplar 95 Feedback and response BQ 9: Why are warnings and morals important? 98 The Inspector’s final speech 101 Blame and triumph 102 Who is he? BQ 10: What do we learn from this play? 103 Responsibility exemplar 105 Extended writing: responsibility 109 Critical ideas 111 Character profiling 113 Feedback and response 3 | P a g e Date: _________________________ 4 | P a g e Date: _________________________ Key Vocabulary and devices Capitalism A political or social viewpoint that believes key values of Capitalism which are individual responsibility, private derived from capital, which evolved from capitale, a late Latin ownership of a country’s trade and industry and rewards for word based on caput, meaning "head" those that are most financially successful. Disdain The feeling that someone or something is unworthy of your respect. based on Latin dignari ‘consider worthy’ Hypocrisy Claiming an idea or belief and then not following it yourself. From Greek hupokritēs ‘actor’, Intuitive A feeling or instinct that something is true. from Latin intueri ‘consider’ Microcosm A community or situation that represents the features of something much larger, like a complete society. Greek mikros kosmos ‘little world’. Nepotism Those with power or influence favouring relatives or friends, especially by giving them jobs. from Italian nepotismo meaning nephew, because Popes often gave their illegitimate sons jobs, pretending that they were nephews. Omniscient Knowing everything. From the medieval Latin scire ‘to know’ Patriarchy A system, society or government that is led by men. From Greek patriarkhia, ‘ruling father’ Prejudiced Having a dislike or distrust of a person or people based upon little evidence. prae ‘in advance’ + judicium ‘judgement’. Privilege A special right, advantage only available to a particular person or group of people. from Latin privilegium ‘bill or law affecting an individual’ Remorseful Sorry or full of regret for actions or behaviour. from Latin remordere ‘vex’, from re- (expressing intensive force) + mordere ‘to bite’ Reputation The beliefs or opinions held by others about someone or something. from Latin reputare ‘think over’ Responsibility Having a sense of duty to deal with or look after someone. from Latin respons- ‘answered, offered in return’ Retribution Punishment inflicted on someone as vengeance for a wrong or criminal act. from late Latin retributio(n- ), from retribut- ‘assigned again’ Socialism A political or social viewpoint that believes key values of which From social, in Latin from socius ‘friend’. include: social ownership of a country’s trade and industry, 5 | P a g e Date: _________________________ Vulnerable Someone who is in a position to be in danger of physical or from Latin vulnerare ‘to wound’ emotional harm. Dramatic irony Where the audience know something that the characters do not. Foreshadowing A warning, hint or indication of a future event. Fourth wall Where an imaginary wall separates the actors from the audience- it stops the characters communicating directly with the audience. Sheila breaks this rule during her confession. The Inspector does the same in his final speech. Monologue A long speech delivered by one actor. Stage direction Text of the script that instructs the movement, position or tone of the actor. Can also instruct the use of sound effects or lighting. Time lapse Within the play, it is implied that time is manipulated for the Inspector’s visit; he is able to question each character and warn them of future events in the time that it takes for a girl’s body to be discovered. Character specific vocabulary Trace the way in which each character develops over the duration of the play Arthur Birling Sheila Birling Gerald Croft Sybil Birling Eric Birling Inspector Goole 6 | P a g e Date: _________________________ BQ1: What compelled Priestley to write this play? Do now: An Inspector Calls and J B Priestley’s political journey Article written by:Alison Cullingford Themes:20th-century theatre, Power and conflict, Exploring identity Published:7 Sep 2017 Alison Cullingford explores how J B Priestley's childhood in Bradford and experiences during two world wars shaped his socialist beliefs and fuelled the anger of his play An Inspector Calls, a work that revolves around ideas of social responsibility and guilt. An Inspector Calls poses troubling questions: how can people live together? To what extent are individuals responsible for others? Gareth Lloyd Evans described the play as ‘perhaps the clearest expression made by Priestley of his belief that “no man is an island” – the theme is guilt and social responsibility’.[1] This article explores how and why J B Priestley came to this belief.[2] ‘Substantial and heavily comfortable’: Bradford before the War Priestley was born in 1894 in Bradford, in Yorkshire’s West Riding. Bradford was an industrial town soon to become a city (in 1897), which had grown very quickly around the wool and dyeing industries. Young ‘Jack’ Priestley himself found work in the wool trade, as a junior clerk with Helm and Company, whose offices were in the (now demolished) Swan Arcade. Jack found this work dull, but otherwise, for a youngster who enjoyed sport, landscape, literature, music, art and socialising, Bradford had much to offer. In his novel Bright Day, he looked back from the austerity of 1946 to a golden age of freedom, plenty, hospitality, conviviality, generosity, solid comfort and strong community, where, at Christmas, brass bands played and choirs sang in the streets; you went not to one friend’s house but to a dozen; acres of rich pound cake and mince-pies were washed down by cataracts of old beer and port, whisky and rum; the air was fragrant and thick with cigar smoke, as if the very mill chimneys had taken to puffing them.[3] The bright young lad realised even then, though, that Bradford was not perfect. Working and living conditions had improved from the hellish days of the 1840s, when cholera and starvation were serious threats, but many still lived in poverty. Priestley’s 7 | P a g e Date: _________________________ political views were heavily influenced by the West Riding’s strong Nonconformist socialist traditions, embodied by the Bradford Pioneer newspaper and epitomised by his schoolteacher father, Jonathan. Jack also noticed that the city’s respectable folk could be smug, even hypocritical: ‘badly-divided men’ were pompously religious on Sundays, but on Saturday nights ‘coarsely raffish’,[4] ill-using young women. In When We Are Married (1937), Priestley made great comedy of turning the world of three respectable couples upside down when it emerged that they had not been legally married. An Inspector Calls also shattered the world of such a family, this time, however, revealing the true social and political consequences of the selfishness of the Birlings and others like them. 1. What did Priestley notice about people in the city? The First World War: men thrown away for nothing This world was itself shattered by the Great War, which broke out in August 1914. Twenty-year-old Jack, drawn to prove himself, went alone to Halifax to volunteer for the Duke of Wellington’s West Riding Regiment. He served in the British Army for five years, as a private and lance-corporal, and, much later, as an officer with the Devonshires. Photograph of J B Priestley as a lance corporal, 1915 J B Priestley volunteered for the army in September 1914 at the age of 19. This photograph was taken in the summer of 1915 just before he was sent to the Western Front. Despite being buried alive by a trench mortar explosion and gassed, Priestley survived relatively unscathed physically; but the experience of war changed him forever. He bore witness to the horrors of the front and his realisation of the implications of social inequalities that went far beyond what he had seen in his home city. As he wrote in his memoir, Margin Released (1962): The British command specialised in throwing men away for nothing. The tradition of an officer class, defying both imagination and common sense, killed most of my friends as surely as if those cavalry generals had come out of the chateaux with polo mallets and beaten their brains out. Call this class prejudice if you like, so long as you remember … that I went into that war without any such prejudice, free of any class feeling. No doubt I came out of it with a chip on my shoulder; a big, heavy chip, probably some friend’s thigh-bone.[5] Bradford could never be the same for Priestley after the war: so many of his friends had been killed, many of them in the 'Bradford Pals' battalions destroyed at the Battle of the Somme.