How Priestley presents Mr Birling, and how the character develops across the text: a self-satisfied capitalist who refuses to accept responsibility, and his dramatic irony.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'heavy-looking, rather portentous man', 'rather provincial in his speech', 'a hard-headed, practical man of business', 'unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable', 'lower costs and higher prices', 'like bees in a hive', 'Just let me finish, Eric. You've a lot to learn yet.', 'I can't accept any responsibility', 'asking for the earth', 'I'd give thousands', 'Probably a Socialist or some sort of crank', 'the famous younger generation who know it all'.
Context: the 1945 audience and that year's Labour victory, set against Birling's 1912 certainties; Birling as a caricature of a capitalist.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
