Getting a bit heavy-handed, aren’t you, Inspector? - some British culture via An Inspector Calls

 

Several years ago I came across a survey of British teachers of English literature.  Over time, many groups have greatly revised, often in the name of relevance and diversity, the reading list for the GCSE, the exam British students took before graduating high school (a current or at least recent list).  But which books did teachers actually pick to teach?

The answer was, when possible, An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestly, to the extent that I was able to calculate that a large majority of British students were tested, and have always been tested, on An Inspector Calls, no matter what other options are available.  The second place book was, by the way, Animal Farm.

So the point of the survey was that more varied contemporary options to the exam did not matter much if teachers just kept riding the same old warhorses.  My point, somewhat different, is that I was not even sure what An Inspector Calls was.  I had better read it.  I just did.

It is a popular play from 1945.  It is short – is it the shortest text on the list? – is it the easiest? 

ERIC:  My God, it’s a bit thick, when you come to think of it –  (Act I, p. 25)

Is it ever!  A bourgeois family is having a pleasant dinner celebrating the engagement of the daughter to a perfectly respectable young man when a police inspector calls with the shocking news that a young woman has committed suicide, and that (this takes a little time) every member of the family is at least a bit responsible for her death.  In another sense, none of them are at all responsible, but I suppose that idea is one of the things that makes the play teachable.  We can have a good debate about agency.

GERALD: (Crossing D. to Inspector)  Getting a bit heavy-handed, aren’t you, Inspector?  (ERIC crosses D.  to chair R. of table.)

INSPECTOR:  Possibly.  But if you’re easy with me, I’m easy with you.

GERALD: After all, y’know, we’re respectable citizens and not dangerous criminals.

INSPECTOR:  Sometimes there isn’t as much difference as you think.  Often, if it was left to me, I wouldn’t know where to draw the line.  (I, 23)

The Inspector is, like Father Brown and Columbo, as much an avenging angel as a detective, an idea that I hoped would be implicit but is instead made explicit by the end of the play.  Everything is made explicit.  This is the Inspector’s exit speech:

INSPECTOR:  One Eva Smith has gone – but there are millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, with what we think and say and do.  We don’t live alone.  We are members of one body.  We are responsible for each other.  And I tell you that the time will soon come when if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.  We don’t live alone.  Good night.  (III, 53-4)

When An Inspector Calls premiered, Germany had just surrendered, days earlier, to the Allies; the war with Japan would go on for several more months.  I am having trouble fitting this speech into that context.  But otherwise An Inspector Calls is careful to resolve all of its mysteries.

It is a well-made play; I would love to see it performed.  But it does not look like a great national treasure to me.  Knock it off that list!  Make teachers pick something else!  Not that I wish new class preps on teachers – sorry.  And perhaps there is some kind of Chesterton’s Fence argument against removing it.

There is no equivalent in the U.S., where our educational system is chaos, or in France, where the texts for the Bac change every year.

I am likely getting much about the GCSE wrong, and sadly I will never be able to find that survey again.

Page numbers refer to the 1972 Dramatists Play Service edition.