This episode is our third Ragged Reading Group discussion – this time we explored the text suggested during our last one: An Inspector Calls by English dramatist J. B. Priestley.
An Inspector Calls is a three-act drama which takes place on a single night in April 1912, focusing on the prosperous upper middle-class Birling family, who live in a comfortable home in the fictional town of Brumley, “an industrial city in the north Midlands”. The family is visited by a man calling himself Inspector Goole, who questions the family about the suicide of a young working-class woman in her mid-twenties. The play is a scathing criticism of the hypocrisies of Victorian and Edwardian English society and as an expression of Priestley’s socialist political principles.
Historian Nick Shepley ( from podcast https://explaininghistory.org ) has provided us with some rich background and context in a previous podcast.
Our Ragged Reading Group on this occasion are Al Burley, Paul Haddock, David Hurley and Billy Dasein – and our superb facilitators are Josie Moon and Carolyn Doyley.
The episode is slightly longer than we’d like but the discussion was so engaging – and relevant to our times and our social condition – that I found it difficult to cut too much out – check it and stay with it to the end for sometimes eviscerating social commentary. We’re all the Inspector now!
To take part in our next Ragged Reading Group just get in touch – our next Ragged Reading Group will be exploring George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier and there’s plenty of time to get hold of the book and to read it because the next group discussion will be sometime in February.
