Joseph John Gurney died in 1847, in his fifty-ninth year; his sister, Mrs.Fry, had died two years earlier.
The younger brother and twelfth child--Joseph John being the eleventh--Daniel Gurney, the last of the twelve children, lived till 1880, aged eighty-nine.

He had outlived by many years the catastrophe to the great banking firm with which the name of Gurney is associated.

This great firm of Overend and Gurney, of which yet another brother, Samuel, was the moving spirit, was organised nine years after his death--in 1865--into a joint-stock company, which failed to the amount of eleven millions in 1866.

At the time of the failure, which affected all England, much as did the Liberator smash a generation later, the only Gurney in the directorate was Daniel Gurney, to whom his sister, Lady Buxton, allowed a pension of L2000 a year.

This is a long story to tell by way of introduction to one episode in _Lavengro_.