 Whilst at his prep school in Sussex (1911–1916), Wells had been a favourite author of Eric Blair/Orwell.As with other writers he had read while at St Cyprian's Prep school, – Kipling, Wodehouse, Swift, Shaw, Thackeray – his loyalty "was virtually unwavering.What he valued in Wells was not the later polemicist, but the novelist whose evocation of certain aspects of life in England before the First World War recalled to Orwell comparable experiences of his own.