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An Inspector Calls is set in the year 1912, before World War I. It was first staged in 1945, after World War II. The 20th century had been as tumultuous for Britain in terms of internal social unrest as in foreign affairs. J. B. Priestley, lifelong adversary of social inequality, had lived though both wars (serving in the trenches in WW1). He chose a pre-WW1 Edwardian setting as a calculated attempt to make his audience see his scathing vision on society through the prism of those tumults-the wars and the Depression-scarred years between. Though he set the play in the past, Priestley wrote about what he saw as modern problems, still unresolved. His purpose was to argue for a more positive future.
While Edward VII died in 1910, the Edwardian Age lingered on. Edward was a notorious pleasure-seeker, in sharp contrast to his mother, Victoria. The superficial image of the age was like Edward's own: an age of splendid, complacent, easy living.
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Mrs. Birling's costume by Norma Bowen
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Britain, center of the world's greatest empire, was probably the wealthiest nation on Earth. All seemed fine in the island kingdom. But this glittering image was in stark contradiction to the discontent felt by too many members of society. Although the discontent had been stirring for decades, some historians see the death of Edward VII as a convenient dividing point between the relative security and stability of the 19th century and the violence and uncertainties of the 20th.
The 19th century, however, was not entirely tranquil. The Industrial Revolution had been the determining socioeconomic and cultural change of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The old economy based on manual labour was replaced by one dominated by machines, producing goods on a scale never before dreamed of. Factories, mills and mines sprouted all over Europe; the disparities in the industrial class system, between owners and workers, became more pronounced. The owners' profits soared; a newly wealthy upper class arose. The working class, now largely an undifferentiated workforce, was forced into menial labour within the factory system, often working in squalid conditions for low pay. The struggle for proper working conditions inspired the formation of unions and campaigns for legislation guaranteeing workers' rights, these the rich resisted, defending their power and profits.
Welcome, then, to the home of a wealthy English factory owner in the spring of 1912. All seems well here, as all seems well in England. Unexpectedly, an inspector calls...
