Complying with the wishes of his guardian Sir Hugo Mallinger, Daniel Deronda invested himself in his education at an early age. He started his schooling career with a tutor named Mr. Fraser before moving onto Eton College, a place that would be his scholarly home from age 13 to age 18 until he was prepared to begin his stint at Cambridge for university-level schooling. While he eventually found himself quite stifled by the strict limits of English academia, Deronda was determined to pursue becoming educated when he was young because he wanted to please and imitate Mallinger. When Mallinger first informed him that he would be sending Daniel away to school to "have the education of an English gentleman" Deronda hesitated, but responded as follows: "'I should like to be a gentleman,' said Daniel, with firm distinctness, 'and go to school, if that is what a gentleman's son must do'" (Eliot 144).
Eton College, the site of said gentlemanly schooling, was founded by King Henry VI in 1440 as the “Kynge’s College of Our Ladye of Eton besyde Windesore” and served as a place where a select number of poor boys called King's Scholars - as well as other boys who had to pay to attend - from the surrounding area could come and study to achieve a similar education to the king's for free. In 1722, the first boarding house was built which was followed by 13 more over the next 40 years and, eventually, reached the 24 we can see on the school's campus today. In 1851, they added mathematics to the list of subjects studied and the "Clarendon Commission of 1861 led to significant changes including better accommodation, a wider curriculum and better-qualified staff" ("Our History"). 1891 saw over a thousand boys enrolled and they had their classes in new facilities and were able to take advantage of the newly added on-campus museum and library ("Our History"). There is no textual evidence that Deronda experienced this, but this is still an interesting element of Eton during the time he would have attended: it relied heavily on corporal punishment as a method of behavioral control. "Until 1964, offending boys could be summoned to the Head Master or the Lower Master, as appropriate, to receive a birching on the bare posterior, in a semi-public ceremony held in the Library, where there was a special wooden birching block over which the offender was held" (Jensen). The majority of the discipline, however, was self-contained within the student body as they followed a prefect system where the older boys held leadership roles over the younger (Jensen).
Below is an image of the "Eton College Chapel, Lupton's Tower, and School Yard From an etching by F. Buckler (c. 1814)" (Gasquiat).
Works Cited:
Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. New York, Oxford University Press, 2014.
Gasquiat, Francis Aidan. "The Religious Life of King Henry VI - Eton College Chapel, Lupton's Tower, and School Yard." Wikimedia Commons, 1923, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:The_religious_life_of_King_Henry_VI.djvu/61. Accessed 28 April 2021.
Jensen, Austin. "The Education of Upper Class Young Men." BYU Theatre, 5 Feb. 2014, https://byuprideandprejudice.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/the-education-of-upper-class-young-men-2/.
"Our History." Eton College, 2020, https://www.etoncollege.com/about-us/our-history/.