How is Mr Birling presented in An Inspector Calls?

How does Mr Birling change across the play?

He barely changes at all, and that is the point. In Act 1 he is celebrating Sheila's engagement to Gerald Croft, the son of a rival and grander business family, and he treats the marriage as a merger: he hopes for "lower costs and higher prices". He hints that he may soon be knighted.

When the Inspector reveals that he sacked Eva Smith for helping to lead a strike for higher wages, he defends the decision as ordinary business sense. As the evening goes on, his worry is not that a young woman has died but that there may be "a public scandal" and that his knighthood is at risk.

At the end, once it seems the Inspector was not a real policeman, he is relieved and jokes about the evening. Sheila and Eric are left shaken; Birling is back where he started. The final phone call, announcing that a girl has just died and an inspector is on his way, catches him unchanged.

What are the key moments for Mr Birling?

His speeches in Act 1. He calls himself "a hard-headed, practical man of business" and tells the young men that the idea of everyone looking after everyone else is "community and all that nonsense". He also declares the Titanic "unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable" and dismisses talk of war. This is dramatic irony: the audience knows he is wrong about the ship and the war, so they learn to doubt him about everything else.

Eva's sacking. He explains that she asked for higher pay and he refused: a man in his position has to keep labour costs down. His language treats workers as costs, never as people, and he feels no need to apologise.

His reaction to the Inspector. He tries to impress him by mentioning that he was Lord Mayor and plays golf with the Chief Constable. It doesn't work, and his bluster makes him look smaller each time.

What context matters for Mr Birling?

Birling represents the capitalist employer Priestley wanted his audience to reject. In 1912, workers had few rights, strikes were often broken by sacking the leaders, and there was no welfare state to catch someone like Eva when she lost her job.

He is also newly rich. His wife is described as her husband's "social superior", and he is anxious about his standing next to the Crofts. His hope for a knighthood shows how much he cares about status and how little about conscience.

For the 1945 audience, Birling stood for the attitudes that, in Priestley's view, had led to poverty and war. Making him confidently wrong about the Titanic and the war was Priestley's way of making the whole outlook look foolish.

What might an exam question on Mr Birling ask?

AQA sets An Inspector Calls in Section A of Paper 2. You choose one of two essay questions, and no extract is printed, so every quotation has to come from memory. The question carries 30 marks, with 4 more for spelling, punctuation and grammar (AO4). Other boards also set an essay on the play, so check your own board's past papers for the exact wording.

Two focuses to practise:

• How does Priestley present Mr Birling as a selfish character?
• How does Priestley use Mr Birling to present his ideas about social class?

What does a strong paragraph on Mr Birling look like?

Here is an original model paragraph for the first focus.

Priestley makes Birling's selfishness look ridiculous before it looks dangerous. In his first long speech he dismisses the idea of shared responsibility as "community and all that nonsense", and in the same breath calls the Titanic "unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable". Because the 1945 audience knows the ship sank, the dramatic irony undermines everything he says: if he is this wrong about the Titanic, he may be just as wrong about how society should work. Priestley lets Birling argue against himself, so the audience rejects his selfish creed without being told to.

Key Mr Birling quotations to learn

Short phrases you can quote exactly, each with a use.

• "a hard-headed, practical man of business" (Act 1): how he sees himself, and what he values.
• "lower costs and higher prices" (Act 1): even his daughter's engagement is a business deal.
• "unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable" (Act 1): the dramatic irony that teaches the audience to doubt him.
• "community and all that nonsense" (Act 1): the belief the Inspector arrives to overturn.
• "a public scandal" (Act 3): he fears exposure, not guilt.