George Orwell's characterization of England as a “family” in The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941) must surely rank among his most infamous statements of Anglocentric Gemeinschaft peddling. Perhaps aware of this, later in life Orwell listed this text as one of a list of four book-length works he did not want republished, alongside A Clergyman's Daughter (1934), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and The English People (1947). It might seem an act of critical churlishness to pay too much attention to this list; it is also important, as Stefan Collini cautions, not to set too much store by Orwell's most famous patriotic pronouncements in The Lion and the Unicorn. And yet, attending to Orwell's reproductive anxieties may prove telling in more ways than one. Read alongside lesser-known materials from the Complete Works, and his famous assertion that “if there was hope, it lay in the proles” (original Latin usage: offspring), these texts reveal a deep-seated preoccupation rarely commented on in Orwell studies: the national birth rate. From the eponymous clergyman's daughter's pathologized asexuality, Gordon Comstock's obsessive hatred of birth control in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, to The English People's brutal recommendation for the government to “make childlessness as painful an economic burden as a big family is now,” Orwell persistently frets over the reproductive capabilities of the English nation.

The modern nation state always requires ideologies and practices of population, necessarily synthesizing forms of national and sexual normativity in its ongoing process of self-constitution. The key episode in Britain pre-dating Orwell's working life was the combination of homosexual panic and reproductive anxieties in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, driven by degeneration theory, Boer War jingoism, and the Wilde trial; the longer, broader history of these imbrications could be traced through the development of Foucault's concept of population, a line of inquiry adumbrated in Security, Territory, Population (1977–8), and continued in his famous analyses of biopolitics. What is distinctive about Orwell's particular synthesis of patriotism and reproductivist heterosexuality is that it is made on behalf of a specifically English “democratic socialism” ranged against both Communism and moribund Toryism, and thus must be seen as an important precursor to the national imaginary of postwar welfare-state Britain – the definitive moment of pronatalist patriotism in twentieth-century British history.