As George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda nears its end, Daniel tells his friend Hans, “I shall by-and-by travel to the East and be away for some years” (DD, p. 854). This is entirely appropriate for a person named Daniel who has from the novel's first lines been placed in the role of an interpreter, and who later is likened to a prophet. Daniel Deronda says that he has “always longed for some ideal task” (DD, p. 819), and when he comes to meet Mordecai with fateful news of his heritage he seems, like that salvational figure envisioned by the biblical Book of Daniel, to be virtually trailing clouds of glory:
Yet when Deronda entered, the sight of him was like the clearness after rain: no clouds to come could hinder the cherishing beam of that moment. (DD, p. 816)
Questions of the origins and meaning of history were of special interest in England during the 1860s and in the decade following, when Eliot was engaged in writing this novel. The prophetic visions of the biblical Book of Daniel seemed crucial to Victorian exegetes in settling current debates about the British world role and by implication about the history of the whole world. One Arthur Stanley, speaking of the dreams of Daniel, wrote in 1865 that “there could be no doubt that they contain the first germs of the great idea of the succession of ages, of the continuous growth of empires and races under a law of Divine Providence, the first sketch of the Education of the world.” Eliot was fully aware of such prophetic traditions. When she sends Daniel Deronda away from England “to the East … for some years,” it is as if she would have him, a modern Daniel, describe a pattern of the world's progress for her own day.