Doctoring Victorian Literature — A Humument: An interview with Tom Phillips

Abstract

Tom Phillips (b. 1937) is a painter, printmaker and collagist, and the creator of A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (1970, 1980, 1986, 1998, 2004, and in 2010 as an iPhone and iPad app), a critically lauded blend of destruction and creativity. In 1965, Phillips, fascinated by the cut-up techniques of William Burroughs, bought a copy of W. H. Mallock’s forgotten novel, A Human Document (1892), from a second-hand furniture store in south London, and set about turning it into something new: A Humument. Each page was ‘treated’: the majority of the text obscured by painted images to leave visible a trickle of words that told a new story — the love between Irma and Toge (the latter appearing whenever Mallock wrote ‘together’).