An Inspector Calls: Age, Gender and Guilt

Priestley splits the Birling family along a clear line: the older generation (Mr and Mrs Birling) versus the younger generation (Sheila and Eric). This divide is the engine of the play's message.

The older Birlings enter the play confident and self-satisfied and leave it unchanged, still insisting the Inspector was a hoax and that nothing they did was wrong. The younger Birlings enter the same way but are transformed: they accept their part in Eva Smith's death and refuse to pretend it never mattered.

Priestley was a socialist writing in 1945, just as Britain was deciding what kind of country to build after the Second World War. He sets the play in 1912, before two world wars and the sinking of the Titanic, so his 1945 audience can see how blind the confident Edwardian world was. The generation gap lets him argue a simple, urgent point.

The young are not yet hardened by wealth and habit. They can still learn responsibility, and so they are Priestley's hope for a fairer society.

This makes age a structural theme, not just a character detail: it organises who changes and who does not.

Mr and Mrs Birling represent the values Priestley wants his audience to reject. They treat their social status as proof that they are right and refuse to see Eva Smith as their equal.

Mr Birling reduces everything to money and reputation. His instinct after the Inspector leaves is relief that there may be "no scandal" rather than sorrow for a dead woman. He calls the whole evening "a lot of moonshine", dismissing its moral weight.

Mrs Birling is the coldest character in the play. As a charity committee chair she refused help to a pregnant, desperate Eva, insisting the girl's own family should be responsible. She calls Eva's claims "a piece of gross impertinence", judging a working-class woman as beneath belief.

Older character	Attitude to Eva	Response by the end
Mr Birling	A troublesome employee he was right to sack	Relieved; fears only scandal
Mrs Birling	An undeserving, immoral girl	Denies all responsibility

Priestley's method here is dramatic irony (when the audience knows more than the character): we hear the Birlings congratulate themselves while knowing their smugness is about to collapse. That irony invites us to judge them.

Sheila and Eric carry Priestley's hope. They are guilty too, but their guilt teaches them something.

Sheila had Eva sacked from Milwards out of jealousy, a cruel abuse of her class power. Yet she is the first to feel the weight of it, admitting she "felt rotten about it at the time". As the play goes on she becomes sharper and braver, warning her mother not to "build up a wall" between herself and the truth, and seeing through the family's attempts to explain the evening away.

Eric fathered Eva's child and stole money to support her. He is weak and troubled (Priestley hints at his heavy drinking), but he too accepts what he did, turning on his parents and telling them they helped to kill her.

By the final act, Sheila and Eric almost speak with the Inspector's voice. They have absorbed his lesson: "We are members of one body."

This is Priestley's point about age. The younger characters prove that people can accept responsibility, if they are willing to look honestly at themselves.

Gender runs through every stage of Eva Smith's destruction, and Priestley uses her to expose Edwardian attitudes to women.

Eva has almost no power because she is a working-class woman. She loses her job for asking for slightly higher wages, loses another for a customer's spite, becomes a man's mistress because she has no security, and is finally refused charity when she is pregnant and alone. Every man in the play uses her, and every woman with power fails her.

Priestley presents a world of patriarchy (a society controlled by men). Even the wealthy Sheila is treated by Gerald and her father as decorative, praised for her looks and expected to marry well. The engagement ring is chosen by Gerald, not with her.

Woman	How gender shapes her fate
Eva Smith	Exploited as worker, lover and mother; no protection at any stage
Sheila	Valued for looks and marriage prospects; grows beyond this role
Mrs Birling	Has status but uses it to enforce prejudice against Eva

The bitter irony is that Mrs Birling, a woman herself, is the one who condemns Eva most harshly, calling her claim to respectability an insult. Priestley shows that class prejudice can override any sense of shared womanhood.

Every character did something to harm Eva Smith. What separates them is how they respond to that guilt—and this becomes Priestley's real test of character.

Guilt is the mechanism the Inspector uses. He forces each person to face what they did, then watches how they react. The younger Birlings feel remorse and change; the older ones deny, minimise and try to move on.

Crucially, guilt does not depend on the facts. Even after Gerald's phone calls suggest the Inspector may not have been real and there may be no single dead girl, Sheila insists it makes no difference: what they each did was still real and wrong. The wrong stands whether or not one specific woman died.

How the characters respond to guilt

• Sheila and Eric: accept it fully; it changes them permanently.
• Gerald: feels some genuine sorrow but seizes on the hoax theory to escape it.
• Mr and Mrs Birling: refuse it entirely and celebrate their apparent escape.

Priestley judges his characters not by their sins but by their conscience. Those who feel guilt can be redeemed; those who reject it cannot.

This is why the theme of guilt ties directly to age. Conscience, in Priestley's view, is easiest to keep alive in the young.

For the exam these three themes are not separate topics; they interlock, and strong answers show how. AQA rewards a conceptualised response that treats the play as a crafted argument, not a list of events.

The link is this: Eva Smith is destroyed because she is a working-class woman (gender); the family's reaction is split by age (the young feel guilt, the old do not); and Priestley's purpose is to warn his 1945 audience that ignoring responsibility leads to catastrophe.

A useful way to frame a paragraph is method plus purpose. Name what Priestley does, then say why:

• Method: Priestley contrasts Sheila's growing conscience with her mother's denial.
• Effect: this dramatises the generation gap and positions the audience to side with the young.
• Purpose: it argues that a fairer, more responsible society is possible if the next generation chooses it.

Connect a theme back to Priestley's message wherever you can: this is a play with a purpose, written to change how its audience thinks about class and responsibility.

1. Treating age, gender and guilt as three unrelated topics

They interlock. Eva suffers because of gender; the family divides over guilt along lines of age. Show the connections rather than writing three separate mini-essays.

2. Forgetting the writer behind the characters

AQA's biggest assessment objective, AO2, rewards analysis of Priestley's methods. Write "Priestley presents Sheila as...", not just "Sheila feels...". The play is a deliberate construction, so keep the writer in view.

3. Missing that Gerald sits in the middle

Gerald is neither fully changed nor fully hardened. He shows real sorrow for Eva but uses the hoax theory to escape guilt. Treating him as simply "young and good" or "old and bad" oversimplifies Priestley's design.

4. Ignoring context (AO3)

Age and gender only make full sense against their background: Edwardian class hierarchy, the lack of rights for working-class women, and Priestley's 1945 socialist purpose. Weave context into your points rather than bolting it on.

5. Claiming Mrs Birling changes

She does not. Unlike Sheila and Eric, she leaves the play unrepentant, still insisting she did nothing wrong. Her lack of change is the point: she embodies the older generation Priestley criticises.