In 1855, the family moved to No. 1 Merrion Square, where Wilde's sister, Isola, was born in 1857.

The Wildes'
new home was larger and, with both his parents' sociality and success soon became a "unique medical and cultural
milieu"; guests at their salon included Sheridan Le Fanu, Charles Lever, George Petrie, Isaac Butt, William Rowan
Hamilton and Samuel Ferguson.
[3]
Until he was nine, Oscar Wilde was educated at home, where a French bonne and a German governess taught him
their languages. He then attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh.
[7]
Until his early
twenties, Wilde summered at the villa, Moytura House, his father built in Cong County Mayo.
[8]
There the young
Wilde and his brother Willie played with George Moore.
Isola died aged nine of meningitis. Wilde's poem "Requiescat" is dedicated to her memory:
[9]
"Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow
Speak gently, she can hear
the daisies grow"
University education: 1870s
Trinity College, Dublin
Wilde left Portora with a royal scholarship to read classics at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1871 to 1874,
[10]
sharing rooms with his older brother Willie Wilde. Trinity, one of the leading classical schools, set him with scholars
such as R. Y. Tyrell, Arthur Palmer, Edward Dowden and his tutor, J. P. Mahaffy who inspired his interest in
Greek literature. As a student Wilde worked with Mahaffy on the latter's book Social Life in Greece.
[11]
Wilde,
despite later reservations, called Mahaffy "my first and best teacher" and "the scholar who showed me how to love
Greek things".
[12]
For his part, Mahaffy boasted of having created Wilde; later, he named him "the only blot on my
tutorship".
[13]
The University Philosophical Society also provided an education, discussing intellectual and artistic subjects such as
Rossetti and Swinburne weekly. Wilde quickly became an established member the members' suggestion book for
1874 contains two pages of banter (sportingly) mocking Wilde's emergent aestheticism. He presented a paper
entitled "Aesthetic Morality".
[14]
At Trinity, Wilde established himself as an outstanding student: he came first in his
class in his first year, won a scholarship by competitive examination in his second, and then, in his finals, won the
Berkeley Gold Medal, the University's highest academic award in Greek.
[15]
He was encouraged to compete for a
demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford which he won easily, having already studied Greek for over nine years.
Magdalen College, Oxford
At Magdalen, he read Greats from 1874 to 1878, and from there he applied to join the Oxford Union, but failed to
be elected.
[16]