Social Responsibility in an “An Inspector Calls”

When the inspector leaves the Birling family standing in their comfortable drawing room, he tells them that we are all members of one body and responsible for each other. I first read those words in my sophomore year at Penn State, sitting in Professor Martinez's modern drama course, and they have haunted me ever since. J.B. Priestley wrote "An Inspector Calls" in 1945, just as World War II ended, but set it in 1912, before the First World War shattered Britain's confidence.

That gap between when the play happens and when Priestley wrote it creates a bitter irony throughout the script. The central theme of social responsibility runs through every scene, every revelation, and every character's defensive reaction. Priestley uses Inspector Goole as a moral voice to argue that the comfortable middle class cannot ignore the suffering of the poor without devastating consequences, and that pretending we have no duty to strangers is both morally wrong and practically dangerous.

I had never thought much about social responsibility before that semester. Growing up in suburban Cleveland, I saw homeless people downtown occasionally, but my parents always said they made their own choices. When I arrived at college, I passed the same man asking for change outside the library every Tuesday and Thursday, and I always looked at my phone. Reading this play forced me to see that avoidance differently. The Birlings represent the privileged class in 1912 England, wealthy factory owners who believe their success proves their virtue. They insist that a man's only responsibility is to himself and his immediate family. Arthur Birling even calls the idea of community responsibility "nonsense" right before the inspector arrives to prove him catastrophically wrong.

Priestley reveals how each Birling family member contributed to Eva Smith's death, showing that individual actions have social consequences whether we acknowledge them or not. Arthur Birling fired Eva from his factory for asking for a small raise, valuing profit over her survival. Sheila Birling had Eva dismissed from a shop because of jealous vanity during one bad mood. Gerald Croft made Eva his mistress and then abandoned her when convenient. Eric Birling forced himself on Eva and got her pregnant. Mrs. Birling used her charity organization to deny Eva help in her final desperate weeks. Each person treated Eva as disposable, someone whose suffering did not matter because she belonged to a lower social class. For my final paper in that course, I traced how the play diagrams a whole system of exploitation, where the comfortable survive by refusing to see the vulnerable as equally human.

The inspector himself represents Priestley's moral vision, though his identity remains mysterious even at the play's end. He investigates not just one death but a whole society's sickness. When he questions each character, he makes them confront exactly how their choices hurt someone they considered beneath notice. He speaks in that final speech about fire and blood and anguish if people do not learn to accept responsibility for one another. Last spring, I volunteered at a food bank in State College for a service-learning requirement, and I kept thinking about that speech while sorting donations. The families who came in were not abstractions or statistics. They were Penn State staff who could not afford rent and groceries, students choosing between textbooks and meals, elderly people on fixed incomes stretching a can of soup across two days. I realized Priestley was right that ignoring their need did not make me innocent.

Some argue that Priestley's message is too heavy-handed, that he sacrifices artistic subtlety for political propaganda. The inspector's final speech does sound like a sermon, and the reveal that he might not have been a real police officer can feel like a gimmick. During our class discussion, several students said the play beat them over the head with its point instead of trusting them to think. They wanted more ambiguity, more room to form their own judgments. I understand that criticism, especially since the ending where the Birlings learn nothing and return to their selfishness can feel frustratingly blunt. Yet I think Priestley wrote this way on purpose because he had watched millions die in two wars caused partly by the same selfish nationalism and class indifference that the Birlings represent. Sometimes a playwright must shout to be heard over the noise of a society determined not to listen.

The play changed how I think about my own choices, though I still struggle to live up to its challenge. I try to remember that the barista making my coffee, the custodian cleaning my dorm hall, and the person asking for help outside the library are part of the same body I belong to. Their dignity and survival connect to mine even when I cannot see the threads. Priestley shows that we can either accept this responsibility willingly and build a more just society, or ignore it and face the fire and blood and anguish he warned about. The Birlings chose denial, and though the play ends before we see their final fate, history showed what happened to their real-world counterparts when the wars came. I do not pretend I have become some model of social conscience since reading this play two years ago. But now when I look away from suffering, at least I know I am making a choice, and that the choice has consequences beyond what I can see.

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