Paul's (a small, probably not very distinguished, private school in nearby Southsea), at an as-yet-unidentified country boarding school (which may, however, have been near Lowestoft), and in 1843-1844 at the Moravian Brothers school in Neuwied on the Rhine; the cost of his education was met by a small legacy from his mother's side of the family. Various attempts, none of them conclusive, have been made to assess this rather eccentric education. On the positive side, some say, was the escape from the more repressive features of the English educational system at that time. At the Protestant school in Neuwied he acquired the tolerance, self-discipline, and cosmopolitan awareness that infused all his later actions. But the circumstances of his being sent to school, first away from his own locality, then to a boarding school in another part of the country, then to a boarding school in a different country, have never been fully explained. Nor has Meredith's early family life been satisfactorily described and analyzed. His mother died in 1833. His father went bankrupt in 1838 and, moving from Portsmouth to London, married his housekeeper, Matilda Buckett, with whom he had in effect been living for a number of years. Meredith absolutely refused in later life to talk about his youth, so it is not known whether he regarded it as happy and normal or as turbulent and unhappy, though various theories have been spun in which his feelings, indeed his traumas, are deduced from his fiction.
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