In keeping with his classically heroic nature, Daniel is a man without firm roots. As a little boy, he lives with the never married Sir Hugo (who marries later, at 45). Sir Hugo refers to himself as Daniel's uncle and when the boy asks after his parent, apparently only once doing so, Hugo tells him that his parents are passed away. According to Eliot, Daniel is so terribly fond of Sir Hugo that he doesn't spend much time as a child pursuing the matter of his passed away parents.
His initial lack of interest in his past is kind of stunning, especially considering his supposed interest in history. Moreover, it's hard to figure out how Sir Hugo could have explained away his having only one real brother, Grandcourt's father, Henleigh Malinger Grandcourt (HMG senior takes his wife's name for unexplained reasons). Nor is his curiousity prodded by his lack of resemblance to any of the generations of Malinger's that hang upon the walls of the family estate.
Eliot memorably describes Daniel as "handsomer than any of them" and as a boy who could have
"served as a model for any painter who wanted to image the most beautiful of boys: you could hardly have seen his face thoroughly meeting yours without believing that human creatures had done nobly in times past, and might do more nobly in time to come. The finest childlike faces have this consecrating power, and make us shudder anew at all the grossness and basely-wrought griefs of the world, lest they should enter here and defile"(166).
When a tutor's comment on the origins of bastards suggests that he might be the bastard child of Malinger, Daniel is not sure what to feel about it. Seen as possibly a father rather than an Uncle, the charming and beloved Sir Hugo suddenly appears in the aspect of a deceiver. Daniel finds that the stories of heroic Shakespearean bastards may have a bearing on his own story. He discovers that "the ardor which he had given to the imaginary world in his books suddenly rushed towards his own history and spent its pictorial energy there, explaining what he knew, representing the unknown"(167). Daniel is a child of imagination and for Eliot this is crucial to a person's living a heroic and a virtuous life. Presented with murkiness, Daniel's imagination is capable of reading his life in light of history, myth and drama, of seeing himself as possibly having a self similar to storybook heroes of yore.
Like Eliot, Daniel is interested in History, especially history of character or how heroes and villains come to be. In the epigraph to the opening chapter, Eliot spoke of the difficulty of locating the start of a story, or, of locating and determining what are the truly determinative causes of a rise or fall. Her own story then demonstrates the difficulty by launching out on an opening only to circle the story to a point further back in the past than the original start of the novel. Sharing his author's interest, the child Daniel has often puzzled over the missing history of great heros. Now confronted with murkiness in his own past, he begins "making conjectures about his own history, as he had often made stories about Pericles or Columbus, just to fill up the blanks before they became famous"(168).
However, beyond conferring upon his life a possibly heroic destiny, the mystery of his antecedents also provokes a "premature reserve which helped to intensify his inward experience"(168). He feels that things are being held from him. He decides, if people do not wish to make mention of his past, he should be careful not to prompt them to do so. A curious choice and one that aligns him a bit with Gwendolyn in her love of gambling and uncertainty?
It is the mystery surrounding his origins which profoundly shapes his characters. He wants to know where he comes, is upset that others know this but he doesn't, but is afraid to find out. This position or "experience" as Eliot labels it is in the author's main often the foundation of "the main lines of character" and plays a larger role than any type of formal education via science or literature (171). Yet, his experience is transformed by inherent aspects of Daniel's being. He possesses "an ardently affectionate nature" and "an inborn lovingness...strong enough to keep itself level with resentment"(171). The "indignation which had long mingled itself with his affection for Sir Hugo took the quality of pain rather than of temper"(175). Yet, his consciousness about this origins is a handicap, a "silent consciousness of a grief within, which might be compared in some ways with Byron's susceptibility about his deformed foot"(174).
But, Daniel's handicap, his disadvantage, works towards his nurturing a sympathetic character. While the circumstances and mystery surrounding his birth might made him into a "self-centred, unloving...Ishmaelite," in fact, Daniel is a "rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a mmyriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender. Deronda's early-wakened susceptibility, charge at first with ready indignation and resistant pride, had raised in him a premature reflection on certain questions of life; it had given a bias to his conscience, a sympathy with certain ills, and a tension of resolve in certain directions, which marked im off from other youths much more than any talents he possessed"(175).
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