Arthur Birling
Self-made industrialist
A "heavy-looking, rather portentous man" in his mid-fifties, Birling is the voice of the capitalist status quo. His opening speeches - about unsinkable ships, unstoppable progress and the nonsense of "community" - are demolished by every subsequent revelation. Priestley uses him to show how men in power absorb new information without updating their convictions. His preoccupation with his possible knighthood reveals an unshaken faith that the social order will reward him.
”It would be very awkward, wouldn’t it?”
Sybil Birling
"Cold" wife and charity board chair
Socially superior to her husband (stage directions: "her husband’s social superior"), Sybil weaponises class and respectability. As chair of the Brumley Women’s Charity Organisation she refuses Eva help and blames "the father of the child", unaware she is condemning her own son. Priestley gives her the play’s most chilling moments of self-protective denial.
“I accept no blame for it at all.”
Sheila Birling
Daughter and moral barometer
Early in Act One Sheila is "pretty" and "pleased with life". By Act Three she has become the play’s sharpest conscience - alert, sarcastic, morally clear. Priestley uses her trajectory as evidence that young women can shed the worldview they are raised into. Her engagement ring is first a symbol of belonging and later a symbol of what she chooses to set down.
“These girls aren’t cheap labour - they’re people.”
Eric Birling
Son and alcoholic heir
Eric is "half shy, half assertive" and clearly drinks heavily. His exploitation of Eva - which tips into what the text treats as something like rape ("I was in that state when a chap easily turns nasty") - is the play’s ugliest moment. Yet, like Sheila, he accepts responsibility where his parents refuse. Priestley gives him no easy redemption but does give him a future.
“You don’t understand anything. You never did. You never even tried.”
Gerald Croft
Sheila’s fiancé
"An attractive chap about thirty", Gerald is the old-money aristocrat among the new-money Birlings. His affair with Daisy Renton is presented with complicated sympathy - the Inspector treats him more gently than the others - but by Act Three he has chosen to join the Birling parents in denial, offering Sheila her ring back. His decision to retreat marks him as more Birling than he first appears.
“Everything’s all right now, Sheila. What about this ring?”
Eva Smith / Daisy Renton
The absent victim
Eva never appears on stage. Priestley’s most important dramatic choice: she is reconstructed entirely through the Birlings’ stories and the Inspector’s photographs. Her absence makes her a representative figure - the name changes (Eva Smith, Daisy Renton, Mrs Birling) tracking the working-class woman’s instability in the Edwardian economy. Whether "she" is one person or several, the Inspector argues, the moral calculus is identical.
Inspector: “Young women living that sort of existence in every city… Miss Birling.”
Inspector Goole
The interrogator
"Not a big man but… an impression of massiveness, solidity and purposefulness." Priestley’s stage directions deliberately mark Goole as more than human. He knows details he could not know; his name is a pun on "ghoul"; his final speech has the cadence of a sermon. Whether he is a spirit, a dream, a rehearsal, or a device, his function is to collapse Edwardian complacency in two hours of stage time.
”We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.”
Edna
The maid
A non-speaking or minimally speaking presence, Edna is the only working-class character physically onstage. Her silent work at the start of Act One quietly enacts the servant relation Priestley wants his audience to notice.
“Yes, ma’am.”