This paper discusses the life of Croatian students in the Habsburg capital of Vienna in the nineteenth century on the basis of the autobiographic and diary notes and personal correspondence of four distinguished members of the Croatian intellectual elite – writers and politicians Juraj Matija Šporer, Andrija Torkvat Brlić, Ignjat Brlić and Ksaver Šandor Gjalski. The sources mentioned enable us to reconstruct some aspects of their everyday life (student obligations, their opinion about some of their professors and their teaching methods, their social and cultural practices). Different intellectual, social and cultural experiences from the period of their education at the University of Vienna exerted very positive influence on their future professional life. These private sources in the comparative methodological approach are used as material for analysing the high school system from the bottom-up perspective, as well as for a cultural transfer from the centre to the periphery.