I very rarely hear students talking about this point - but it is so important!
The plot and themes of An Inspector Calls are heavily influenced by the politics and values of Britain in the early 20th century. In this video, I will talk you through the essential historical context that you need to understand about the period, and Priestley's aims and intentions. I will then explain how this helps us to understand why Priestley has set his play in 1912 even though it was performed decades later. We'll talk through the key analysis you can do and how it helps you to answer exam questions on the play.
I really believe that this is such a simple concept, and yet it opens up a hugely insightful angle to analysing the play. So few students talk about this that it also gives you a unique perspective that will wake those exhausted examiners up and make them pay more attention! (no shade to examiners - I cannot imagine how exhausting it must be to mark literally hundreds of essays on the same play).
This video is on my YouTube channel. However, there are a few benefits to watching it here instead:
- You can register to keep a track of which videos you’ve watched
- You can bookmark lessons for later
- There may or may not be no ads, but I can neither confirm nor deny and I definitely didn't tell you if YouTube asked, OK?
There are also resources to help you in the Study Materials section:
An Inspector Calls Vocabulary Bank
The words in this vocabulary bank will help you to develop a more sophisticated and high level understanding of the key ideas and concepts in 'An Inspector Calls'.
As well as providing a range of words, their definitions and an example sentence, this book also suggests a number of activities that you can use to revise and put the vocabulary into practice.
Bonus - it's completely free!
An Inspector Calls AQA GCSE Model Answers (Coming soon!)
This resource will have model answers for multiple years of AQA past papers, giving you the ability to see what high grade essays look like for a range of essay questions.
An Inspector Calls Edexcel IGCSE Model Answers (Coming soon!)
This resource will have model answers for multiple years of Edexcel past papers, giving you the ability to see what high grade essays look like for a range of essay questions.
An Inspector Calls Flipped Learning (Coming soon!)
This resource is designed for teachers and students: it is a workbook designed to be completed alongside all of my An Inspector Calls videos. It is essentially a structured way for you to take notes and ensure that you are squeezing every ounce of advice my videos have to offer.
I fully intend to add more videos and study materials on this play. If there's something in particular you're looking for, then register and get in touch to let me know what would help you.
Lesson Transcript:
Today we are looking at J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls. Specifically, we are tackling something that is rarely talked about in essays that has the power to transform the insightfulness of both your argument and your analysis. And that is the fact that the play was set in 1912, but was written in 1945.
Now, if you have to write about the context of the play in your essays, this is a contextual detail that is incredibly useful to you, because it gives a big-picture appreciation of how context impacts the drama. You might be used to talking about really specific details like the Titanic sinking or the General Strike, but those are usually only applicable to a single quote. This 33-year gap between when the play was set and when it was written is applicable to the entire play. That is vital, because it means it's a contextual point you can use to drive an entire sophisticated argument.
The first thing you need to understand is three pieces of critical terminology: the context of production, the context of reception, and the context of setting:
-
When we talk about the context of production, we're looking at 1945: the exact time, place, and political climate in which J.B. Priestley sat down to write this play.
-
With the context of reception, we're still looking at 1945, but this time at how that time period impacts the way the audience receives or interprets the play.
-
The context of setting, however, is 1912: the world inside the play, where the Birling family resides, and the political climate of that period.
Why did Priestley create this gap? To answer that, let's imagine you were watching a TV show that was set 33 years ago. That's around 1993. On the one hand, you're able to understand that world. It's not like it's medieval England where everyone is essentially speaking a different language and the customs and technology are completely unrecognizable, but there are still massive differences and you can see them: the way people dress, what is and is not acceptable for people to do in society, and what society valued and believed.
Now, imagine I'm a writer, and I want my audience to reflect on something about our society today that has made great progress. One of the best ways I can do that is to write my story in the not-too-distant past—so 1993 if I'm writing in 2026. And then my audience can reflect and think, "Wow, look at how backward we were," or, "Wow, how have we not sorted this out and fixed that? It's still going on today."
That's essentially what Priestley wants from his audience. The two world wars completely transformed the world. By setting his play before all of that, Priestley can explore what society used to be like and criticize that past, while also celebrating the progress in the present and raising questions about whether things have gone far enough.
Let's get into the history of 1912 versus 1945 to understand what exactly it is he's trying to criticize, celebrate, and question.
Starting with what he's trying to criticize: in 1912, Britain was at the absolute peak of Edwardian capitalism. The class system was rigidly, unapologetically entrenched. If you were a wealthy industrialist like Arthur Birling, the world was your oyster. But if you were working class like Eva Smith, there was absolutely no safety net: no welfare state, no free healthcare, no legal protection. A huge aspect of this play's criticism is that class inequality, and the lack of community and care for those in need of help. If you want more detail on this context, by the way, check out my video on everything you need to know about the play's context; I'll put the link in the video description.
Not only that, but something Priestley despises and what he wants his audience to see is the absolute complacency of this era. The wealthy elite in 1912 felt invincible. They genuinely believed that society was on an endless upward trajectory of profit, luxury, and stability for them. And you can see that in Mr. Birling's speeches at the start of the play, with his "peace and prosperity and rapid progress everywhere" and his refusal to accept that there might be war.
The only reason, though, that this criticism comes through to our audience is because of that 33-year gap. If the audience were listening in 1912 to Mr. Birling saying there won't be war, they might disagree with him, but they don't have any concrete evidence to disprove him. Our 1945 audience know without a shadow of a doubt how wrong he is. In other words, the gap between the setting and the reception is the catalyst for the dramatic irony of the play.
Dramatic irony is when the audience knows something that the characters do not. Now, in some novels or plays, this might be because the audience witnessed an event or heard a character say something that other characters didn't. But in An Inspector Calls, it is purely because the play is set in 1912 while the audience are in 1945, and so they have 33 years' worth of historical knowledge that Mr. Birling doesn't.
That dramatic irony is everything. If you've seen my video analyzing Mr. Birling—again, link in the description if you haven't—you'll know that those speeches are one of the most important moments in the whole play for basically every theme and key point that Priestley is trying to make. And underlying every key theme and key point is the dramatic irony, and underlying the dramatic irony is the gap between 1912 and 1945. So in my view, you cannot truly understand An Inspector Calls if you don't understand the power of that gap.
What about what he is trying to celebrate and question? To understand that, we have to look at our context of production and reception: 1945.
Think about who is sitting in those theater seats in 1945. These people aren't the arrogant Edwardians like Mr. Birling in 1912; they are a battle-hardened generation. They have lived through the trauma of the First World War, the brutal poverty of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and they have literally just survived the Blitz of World War II. They have physically lived through the "fire and blood and anguish" that the Inspector prophesies at the end of Act 3.
And this is what Priestley is celebrating: he is celebrating the fact that out of the horrors of those years, British society had actually made incredible progress. To survive the Second World War, the British public had to essentially abandon Arthur Birling's individualistic ideology. They had to operate collectively: rationing, communal bomb shelters, evacuation schemes, and a unified war effort had proven to the entire nation that society functioned infinitely better when people looked out for one another.
So when Inspector Goole stands on stage and delivers his socialist manifesto—"We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other"—the 1945 audience isn't just hearing a nice political theory; they are hearing their own lived reality being validated. Priestley is celebrating the more community-minded Britain by criticizing the Britain without it.
But Priestley is also using this gap to question them. In 1945, the war was over and a monumental general election was coming. Britain was at a defining crossroads, and Priestley is using that reality of the 1912 Birlings to ask his contemporary audience a question: now that the war is over, are we really going to slide back into that greed, selfishness, and class arrogance that caused all that destruction, or are we going to pursue change?
The ending of the play really stresses this point. Not to sound too much like a broken record, but see the link in the description for my analysis of the play's ending. Because of that cyclical structure, when the Birlings refuse to change and that phone rings and says a woman has died and an inspector is on his way, Priestley essentially warns his audience on the same idea as the philosopher George Santayana wrote in 1905: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Now, we can't know if Priestley had read Santayana, but we do know that he is making the same point.
Interestingly, the play was performed first in Russia before the general election—May 1945 versus July 1945—and it wasn't performed in England until the year after, in 1946. The government that was elected in July 1945, Clement Attlee's government, introduced the NHS and the welfare state. Now, I'm not trying to suggest Priestley is responsible for the Attlee government being elected. Like I said, it wasn't even performed in England before the election, and a relatively small percentage of the British population would have seen it in 1946 anyway. But I am suggesting that perhaps what Priestley was doing was trying to capture the mood of the British people at that time. He was capturing the zeitgeist: a desire for less individualism, more collectivism. And he did that by reminding us all what we do not want anymore, and therefore set his play in 1912.
I think that's why Inspector Goole is often described as prophetic. I think there is a pretty unsubtle wink to the audience there, as Inspector Goole is the vehicle that Priestley uses to express much more 1945 values and beliefs. In other words, the challenge between Mr. Birling and the Inspector isn't just a clash of personalities: Birling represents the outdated mindset of 1912 individualism, while the Inspector is like a sort of time-traveling proxy for Priestley himself, adding that hard-won collectivist wisdom of 1945 directly into the Birlings' dining room. And again, the ultimate foundational crafting that Priestley needed to achieve all of that, long before the Inspector's language or the structural contrast between the characters, is to set his play 33 years in the past.
So, from what I've been through there, hopefully you can see how this gap between 1912 and 1945 is a really useful tool for you to use in your essays. But the biggest request from me is: please do not make it a one-sentence tag-on at the end of a paragraph of "Oh, and by the way, there is this gap between 1912 and 1945 and that makes a difference." Instead, integrate it into your analysis. Analyze that dramatic irony; analyze the audience reaction and how that gap is impacting the audience reaction. If you can do that, then you are going to be operating at a much higher level of insight than most students writing their An Inspector Calls essays.