In 2014 the Folio Society published an illustrated slipcase edition of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four with pictures by the British illustrator Jonathan Burton and an introduction by Alan Rusbridger, then editor-in-chief of the Guardian, the paper that had published Edward Snowden's revelations about mass surveillance the year before. Burton's muted, sepia-toned images follow Winston Smith from the grey streets of Airstrip One to the Chestnut Tree Café, while Rusbridger's essay asks the question the Snowden story made unavoidable: how "Orwellian" is the modern surveillance state?
Below you will find the illustrations scene by scene, the background to the introduction, a few corrections to how the Snowden episode is often told, and some context on why Orwell's novel keeps returning to the bestseller lists.
The Folio Society edition
Founded in London in 1947, the Folio Society specialises in newly illustrated, finely bound editions of classic books, pairing living artists with famous texts. Its Nineteen Eighty-Four arrived in a slipcase with full-page illustrations by Burton, whose work has also appeared in magazines and on book covers around the world. The illustrations are credited © Jonathan Burton 2014.
Illustrating Orwell is a challenge because the book's horror is mostly quiet: rooms that are watched, words that are erased, people who vanish. Burton answers with restraint. His palette is almost colourless, his figures are thin and tense, and the Party is present everywhere in posters, screens and a face looming over the final scenes. The result sits comfortably beside earlier visual takes on Orwell, such as Ralph Steadman's 1995 illustrations for Animal Farm.
Rusbridger's introduction and the "Orwellian" debate
Rusbridger opens with the moment the Snowden files went public in June 2013. Readers immediately reached for Orwell: sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four reportedly rose as much as sevenfold in the following week. On 16 December 2013, in the case Klayman v. Obama, US District Judge Richard Leon ruled that the National Security Agency's bulk collection of phone records probably violated the Fourth Amendment and called the technology "almost Orwellian". That ruling was later vacated on appeal on procedural grounds, but the phrase stuck.
Rusbridger traces how the argument split. Some commentators said Snowden had exposed a world close to Orwell's; others said modern data collection went far beyond anything Orwell imagined; a third camp found the comparison insulting, arguing that a liberal democracy defending itself is nothing like Oceania. He reminds readers of Thomas Pynchon's line, from his foreword to a 2003 edition of the novel, that "prophecy and prediction are not quite the same." Orwell was not forecasting gadgets. He was describing what power does when it can see everything and answer to no one.
That is the most useful lesson of the introduction: the question is less whether today's world matches the novel point by point, and more what future uses a technology might be put to once it exists. Asking that early, in public, is exactly what the novel's citizens can no longer do.
The illustrations, scene by scene
Victory Mansions and the posters
Winston stands at a window looking over a ruined, rain-grey London, where the only colour comes from the Party's posters of Big Brother. The towering white building in the distance suggests the Ministry of Truth, where Winston works rewriting old newspapers so the past always agrees with the Party. Burton's opening image sets the tone for the whole book: drab, watched and silent.
The note at the Ministry
At his desk, beneath a "Big Brother is watching you" poster and beside the speakwrite machine, Winston reads a slip of paper passed to him by Julia, a young woman from the Fiction Department whom he had suspected of being a spy. Unfolded, it carries three words in "a large unformed handwriting: I love you." For a man under constant surveillance, it is the most dangerous message imaginable.
In the woods
Far from the telescreens, Winston and Julia meet in a sunlit wood outside London. Burton shows Winston kneeling before her among slender trees and taking her hands. In the novel their affair is an act of rebellion as much as of love, because the Party tries to drain all private feeling and channel it into loyalty.
O'Brien's apartment
Winston and Julia stand before O'Brien, a senior member of the Inner Party, who sits working under a green-shaded lamp while a telescreen hangs above him. They believe he belongs to the secret resistance, the Brotherhood. He is in fact working for the Thought Police, and this visit seals their fate.
Reading the forbidden book
In the rented room above Mr Charrington's shop, where the couple think they are safe, Winston sits up in bed reading Emmanuel Goldstein's banned book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, while Julia sleeps. Its chapters carry the Party's own slogans as titles, including "Ignorance is Strength" and "War is Peace". The engraving of a church on the wall echoes the old rhyme about the bells of London that runs through the novel.
The Chestnut Tree Café
After his arrest and "re-education" in the Ministry of Love, a broken Winston sits alone at a chessboard in the Chestnut Tree Café, with the vast face of Big Brother filling the background. Almost without thinking, he writes in the dust on the table the equation the Party tortured him into accepting, 2 + 2 = 5. It is one of the bleakest final scenes in modern fiction.
The finished book
The open volume shows how the illustrations sit in the finished edition, facing pages of text, with a colourful collage of Party propaganda as an endpaper or frontispiece. Folio editions are designed to be read as well as displayed, which is part of why they are popular as gifts.
The Guardian, Snowden and Rusbridger: what actually happened
Retellings of this story often compress it, so a few facts are worth setting straight. The first Snowden stories were reported for the Guardian by Glenn Greenwald, working with filmmaker Laura Poitras and the paper's own staff, under Rusbridger's editorship. Rusbridger did not personally break the story, but he took the decisions to publish it.
The paper also did not simply refuse to hand over Snowden's material. In 2013, under pressure from the British government, Rusbridger chose to destroy the hard drives holding the files in the Guardian's London offices, with officials present, rather than surrender them. He later called the exercise rather pointless, because other copies existed: reporting continued from New York, and material was shared with the New York Times.
In 2014 the Guardian and the Washington Post shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their reporting on NSA surveillance. Rusbridger announced in December 2014 that he would step down, and he left the editorship at the end of May 2015, succeeded by Katharine Viner. Contrary to some reports at the time, he did not go on to chair the Scott Trust, which owns the paper: in May 2016 he announced he would not take up that role. He became Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and later edited Prospect magazine.
Why Nineteen Eighty-Four keeps coming back
Orwell's novel was first published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg in London. It gave English a vocabulary for political lying that is still in daily use: Big Brother, telescreens, Newspeak, doublethink, thoughtcrime, the Thought Police and Room 101. Its sales spike whenever events seem to echo it. After the Snowden leaks it surged, and in January 2017 it topped Amazon's US charts again after a White House adviser used the phrase "alternative facts".
Part of its staying power is that it is not really about technology. The telescreen is frightening, but the deeper horror is a state that controls language and memory so completely that people can no longer tell what is true. That is why readers return to it in moments of political doubt, and why each new illustrated edition finds an audience.
More great illustrated classics
Burton's work belongs to a long tradition of artists reinterpreting great books. If you enjoy this edition, these pairings are worth seeking out:
- William Blake's illustrations for John Milton's Paradise Lost
- Maurice Sendak's artwork for Blake's Songs of Innocence
- Pablo Picasso's 1934 etchings for Aristophanes' Lysistrata
- Henri Matisse's 1935 etchings for James Joyce's Ulysses
- Salvador Dalí's illustrations for Don Quixote, Dante's Divine Comedy, Romeo and Juliet and the essays of Montaigne
- Mimmo Paladino's etchings for the Folio Society's Ulysses
- John Vernon Lord's illustrations for the Folio Society's Finnegans Wake
For Orwell himself, his essays "Why I Write" and "Politics and the English Language" make a perfect companion to the novel, and his playful 1946 piece "A Nice Cup of Tea" shows a much lighter side of the same sharp mind.
Sources: Illustrations © Jonathan Burton 2014, courtesy of The Folio Society; first featured by Maria Popova, The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings). Wikipedia: Alan Rusbridger; Wikipedia: Klayman v. Obama; Wikipedia: Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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