Two historical moments: 1912 and 1945
Priestley sets An Inspector Calls in the spring of 1912 but wrote and first staged it in 1945. That double date is the heart of the play’s dramatic irony: a 1945 audience, having lived through two world wars, the 1918 flu pandemic, the General Strike, the Great Depression and the Labour landslide, hears Birling’s Edwardian confidence as absurd. Everything the characters trust - empire, capital, class - has already been shattered by the time the play is performed.
Edwardian Britain (1901-1914)
The "Edwardian summer" is often remembered as a period of stability but was, in reality, riven by strikes, suffragette militancy, Irish home rule crises and German naval rivalry. Trade union membership doubled between 1910 and 1914, and female workers - like Priestley’s Eva - organised for better wages in industries including textiles and domestic service. Priestley’s Birling, dismissing "community and all that nonsense", misreads a genuinely turbulent moment as one of certain progress.
J. B. Priestley’s socialism
Priestley (1894-1984) was a Yorkshire-born novelist, playwright and broadcaster. His WWII Postscript broadcasts on the BBC - second only to Churchill in their reach - articulated a vision of post-war Britain built on collective responsibility. He helped found the Common Wealth Party and the later Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The Inspector’s "one body" speech is essentially an articulation of Priestley’s democratic socialism on stage.
Post-WW2 Britain and the welfare state
An Inspector Calls premiered in Moscow in 1945 and in London in 1946 - between the end of the war and the Attlee government’s creation of the NHS (1948) and welfare state. Priestley’s play functions as rhetorical support for that project: by showing 1912 capitalism as morally bankrupt, it implicitly argues that the post-war settlement should look radically different.
The Beveridge Report and "Five Giants"
Beveridge’s 1942 report on "Social Insurance and Allied Services" identified five "giants" blocking post-war reconstruction: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Priestley’s Eva embodies all five. The report’s recommendations informed the NHS, the welfare state, and the 1944 Education Act - and Priestley is in effect dramatising the moral argument that Beveridge made in actuarial language.
The "well-made play" tradition
Priestley inherits a late Victorian and Edwardian tradition of the "well-made play" (the pièce bien faite): three acts, a drawing-room set, exposition by servants, a late-revealed secret. He uses this inheritance to lull the audience into expecting a domestic thriller, then turns it into a political sermon with the Inspector’s arrival. The play’s form is part of its argument.
Priestley, time and metaphysics
Priestley was influenced by J. W. Dunne’s "An Experiment with Time" and other non-linear theories of time. His earlier "time plays" - Dangerous Corner, Time and the Conways, I Have Been Here Before - use plot loops, dream structures and alternative timelines. An Inspector Calls’ phone-call twist is part of the same body of work: it implies the Birlings are being offered a rehearsal, a second chance they are already on the verge of squandering.
Reception and lasting influence
The play fell somewhat out of fashion in the 1950s and 60s before Stephen Daldry’s radical 1992 National Theatre revival reframed it as a Brechtian political parable. That production, still touring, is the version most students will see. It remains one of the most performed and studied modern British plays, particularly in schools.