In An Inspector Calls, the central theme is responsibility. Priestley is interested in our personal responsibility for our own actions and our collective responsibility to society. The play explores the effect of class, age and sex on people's attitudes to responsibility, and shows how prejudice can prevent people from acting responsibly.

The words responsible and responsibility are used by most characters in the play at some point. Each member of the family has a different attitude to responsibility (some more contreversially than others- mr birling, mrs Birling)

            

Characters	Attitudes to the lower class:	Attitudes to the upper class:
	At the start of the play, this character was...	To this character, Eva was...
Mr Birling	keen to be knighted to cement his hard-fought rise to the upper class	cheap labour
Sheila	happy spending a lot of time in expensive shops	someone who could be fired out of spite
Gerald	prepared to marry Sheila, despite her lower social position	a mistress who could be discarded at will
Eric	awkward about his 'public-school-and-Varsity' life	easy sex at the end of a drunken night out
Mrs Birling	socially superior to her husband, and embarrassed at his gaffes	a presumptuous upstart