In various writings from the 1940s on popular culture, George Orwell examined commercial texts such as comics and crime novels, seeking out political meanings that ran counter to what he considered an inherent tendency toward socialism in the English common people. The public, he concluded, was often being duped by a convert patrician conservatism, conveyed through commercial culture, that restrained the people’s radical instincts. These works constituted some of Orwell’ s greatest writing, yet those who see him as a lone precursor to today’s cultural studies, a field in which scholars examine the ideological implications of popular culture, are mistaken. A number of left-wing writers in the 1930s, many of them associated with the Communist Party, saw the need to take popular culture seriously.