but many were bought as biscuit ware from Wedgwood and others and decorated by De Morgan's workers. Some were signed by his decorators including Charles Passenger, Fred Passenger, Joe Juster and Miss Babb. De Morgan was particularly drawn to Eastern tiles. Around 1873–1874, he made a striking breakthrough by rediscovering the technique of lustreware (marked by a reflective, metallic surface) found in Hispano-Moresque pottery and Italian maiolica. Nor was his interest in the East limited to glazing techniques, but it permeated his notions of design and colour as well. As early as 1875, he began to work in earnest with a "Persian" palette: dark blue, turquoise, manganese purple, green, Indian red, and lemon yellow, Study of the motifs of what he referred to as "Persian" ware (and what we know today as 15th and 16th-century İznik ware), profoundly influenced his unmistakable style, in which fantastic creatures entwined with rhythmic geometric motifs float under luminous glazes. The pottery works was beset by financial problems, despite repeated cash injections from his wife, the pre-Raphaelite painter Evelyn De Morgan (née Pickering), and a partnership with the architect Halsey Ricardo. This partnership was associated with a move for the factory from Merton Abbey to Fulham in 1888. During the Fulham period De Morgan mastered many of the technical aspects of his work that had previously been elusive, including complex lustres and deep, intense underglaze painting that did not run during firing. However, this did not guarantee financial success, and in 1907 William De Morgan left the pottery, which continued under the Passenger brothers, the leading painters at the works. "All my life I have been trying to make beautiful things," he said at the time, "and now that I can make them nobody wants them." William De Morgan turned his hand to writing novels, and became better known than he ever had been for his pottery. His first novel, Joseph Vance, was published in 1906,<ref>{{Cite book |author=John Sutherland |author-link=John Sutherland (author) |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QzJ3yNVVqtUC&pg=PA178 |chapter=De Morgan, William |pages=178–179 |title=The Stanford Companion to Victorian Literature |orig-year=1989 |year=1990|isbn=9780804718424}}</ref> and was an instant sensation in the United States as well as the United Kingdom. This was followed by An Affair of Dishonour, Alice-for-Short, and the two-volume It Never Can Happen Again (1909). The genre has been described as "Victorian and suburban". William De Morgan died of trench fever in London in 1917, and was buried in Brookwood Cemetery. Recollections