Language & Imagery

Analysing Priestley's language choices is essential for achieving top marks at GCSE. An Inspector Calls may not have the poetic density of Shakespeare, but Priestley's dramatic language — his use of stage directions, rhetoric, repetition, irony, and carefully chosen imagery — is just as worthy of close analysis. This lesson equips you with the tools to write about language at a Grade 9 level.

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Dramatic Irony

Dramatic irony is the single most important language device in the play. It occurs whenever the audience knows something that the characters do not.

Key Examples of Dramatic Irony

Birling's line	What the audience knows
"The Titanic ... unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable"	The Titanic sank on 15 April 1912
"I say there isn't a chance of war"	World War I began in 1914
"In twenty or thirty years' time ... you'll be living in a world that'll have forgotten all these Capital versus Labour agitations"	Two world wars; the Labour Party won a landslide in 1945
"We're in for a time of steadily increasing prosperity"	The Great Depression hit in the 1930s