An Inspector Calls: The Birlings, Gerald and Eva Smith

Priestley builds An Inspector Calls around a single wealthy family and the man engaged to their daughter. Together the Birlings and Gerald Croft form a microcosm, a small group standing for something much larger: the comfortable, powerful upper-middle class of 1912 Britain.

Priestley splits them along one crucial line, the generation gap. The older characters cling to their selfish values; the younger ones change. This split carries the play's central hope, that a fairer future is possible if the young learn what their parents refuse to.

Character	Generation	Response to the evening
Arthur Birling	Older	Refuses responsibility; unchanged
Sybil Birling	Older	Refuses responsibility; unchanged
Gerald Croft	Older in outlook	Sides with the parents by the end
Sheila Birling	Younger	Accepts guilt; transformed
Eric Birling	Younger	Accepts guilt; transformed

Keeping this map in your head lets you structure almost any character or theme essay: contrast those who learn with those who do not.

Arthur Birling is a wealthy factory owner, a former Lord Mayor, and Priestley's portrait of everything wrong with individualistic capitalism. He is proud, socially ambitious, and utterly certain of himself.

Priestley discredits him from the start through dramatic irony (the audience knowing what he does not). Birling calls the Titanic "unsinkable" and dismisses the threat of war, and the 1945 audience knows how wrong he is on both counts. Once he is wrong about these facts, the audience distrusts his opinions too.

His values are captured in his lecture just before the Inspector arrives: a man should "look after himself and his own", and talk of community is "nonsense". He sacked Eva Smith simply for asking for a small pay rise, and he shows no remorse, worrying only that the scandal might cost him a knighthood.

Quotation	Analysis
Titanic is "unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable"	Dramatic irony destroys his credibility from the outset.
"a man has to look after himself and his own"	His creed of selfish individualism, the opposite of Priestley's message.
Community and all that "nonsense"	Dismisses collective responsibility, the exact idea the play champions.

By the end, Birling has learned nothing, more worried about his public reputation than about a dead girl. Priestley leaves him a warning, not a hero.

Mrs Birling is Arthur's social superior and the coldest character in the play. She embodies the class prejudice that lets the wealthy see the poor as unworthy of help.

She chairs a charity that is supposed to help women in distress, yet she used her influence on the committee to deny help to a pregnant, desperate Eva Smith, prejudiced against the girl for daring to call herself "Mrs Birling" and refusing to believe her account. She will not accept that a working-class girl could have fine feelings or scruples.

Her downfall is one of the play's most satisfying moments of dramatic irony. Not realising the father of Eva's child is her own son, she insists the young man be found and made to take full responsibility, publicly and completely. She traps herself: the young man is Eric. Even then, she resists the lesson, unable to accept her family's guilt.

Mrs Birling represents the hard heart of the class system: charitable in name, but withholding real compassion from the very people she claims to help.

Sheila undergoes the fastest and fullest transformation in the play, and by the end she becomes its moral centre, the character closest to Priestley's own view.

At first she is a privileged, slightly spoilt young woman. Her part in Eva's death is petty and cruel: jealous of a prettier shop girl, she had Eva sacked from Milwards on a whim. But unlike her parents, Sheila is horrified when she understands the consequences. She takes full responsibility at once and does not try to wriggle out of it.

As the evening goes on she becomes sharp and perceptive. She warns the others not to build "a wall" between themselves and the Inspector, and she is the first to sense that he is no ordinary policeman. When the family try to explain away the whole evening as a hoax, Sheila refuses. She insists that whether or not the Inspector was real, and whether or not there was one girl or several, the family really did behave as they confessed, and that is what matters.

Sheila acts as a foil to her parents: her willingness to learn throws their stubbornness into sharp relief. She is Priestley's evidence that the younger generation can change.

Eric Birling is the troubled son, and by the end he joins Sheila in accepting the play's lesson. Eric drinks too much (a fact the family have quietly ignored) and his behaviour towards Eva was the worst in some ways: he forced his way into a relationship with her when drunk, got her pregnant, and stole money from his father's office to support her. Yet Eric is capable of shame and change. He is disgusted by his parents' refusal to face what they have done, and like Sheila he insists the girl still died and their actions still count.

Gerald Croft is the most complicated case. Older in outlook and part of the aristocratic Croft family, he genuinely cared for Eva (as "Daisy Renton") and kept her as his mistress for a summer before ending the affair. His confession is honest and even tender. But when the crisis passes, Gerald sides with the older Birlings: he is the one who discovers Goole was not a real inspector and eagerly concludes it was all a hoax. His attempt to win Sheila back with the engagement ring, as if nothing has happened, shows he has not truly learned.

Character	High point	Where they end up
Eric	Accepts guilt; condemns his parents	Changed, aligned with Sheila
Gerald	Honest, tender confession	Backslides; treats it as a hoax

The contrast is deliberate. Eric shows the young can change; Gerald shows that even the young can slip back into old, comfortable values.

Eva Smith is the most important character who never appears on stage. She is dead before the play begins, and the audience never sees her or hears her voice. This is a deliberate and powerful choice by Priestley.

By keeping her faceless and silent, Priestley turns Eva into a symbol rather than an individual. She stands for the whole exploited working class, for every anonymous person the powerful use and discard. Her many names underline this: she is "Eva Smith" to Birling, "Daisy Renton" to Gerald, "Mrs Birling" at the charity. The Inspector even suggests there are "millions and millions" of Eva Smiths and John Smiths, ordinary people whose lives are bound up with the powerful. Her name reinforces the point: "Eva" echoes Eve, the first woman, and "Smith" is the commonest English surname.

Because she never speaks for herself, everything the audience knows about Eva comes through the people who wronged her. This forces us to judge the Birlings by their own accounts, and it keeps our sympathy with the voiceless victim rather than the comfortable family.

Eva Smith's silence is the point. She cannot defend herself, just as the real poor of 1912 had no voice, so Priestley makes the audience feel the injustice of a world that speaks about people like her but never to them.

1. Treating characters as real people, not constructs

Every character is a deliberate choice by Priestley to serve his message. Write about what Sheila or Mr Birling represents and why Priestley presents them as he does, not just what they are "like" as if they were real.

2. Missing the generation divide

The split between the unchanging older Birlings and the transformed younger ones is central to the play's hope. An essay that lumps the family together as simply "the Birlings" misses Priestley's most important structural contrast.

3. Forgetting Gerald backslides

Gerald's honest confession can tempt students to place him with the reformed young. But he sides with the parents at the end and treats the evening as a hoax. Track where each character ends up, not just their best moment.

4. Writing about Eva Smith as a fully drawn character

Eva never appears and never speaks. Analyse her as a symbol of the exploited working class and explain why Priestley keeps her voiceless, rather than discussing her feelings as though she were on stage.

5. Losing the link to Priestley's message

Character analysis scores highest when it connects to the theme of responsibility. Show how each character's response to Eva's death dramatises Priestley's argument that we are responsible for one another.