I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion: I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him.

The Vicar – Dr. Charles Primrose – lives an idyllic life in a country parish with his wife Deborah, sons George (eldest), Moses, Bill, and Dick, and daughters Olivia and Sophia.

He is wealthy due to investing an inheritance he received from a deceased relative, and he donates the £35 that his job pays annually to the widows and orphans of local clergy.

On the evening of George's wedding to wealthy Arabella Wilmot, the Vicar loses all his money through the bankruptcy of his merchant investor who has left town abruptly.

Olivia is captivated by Thornhill's hollow charm; but he also encourages the social ambitions of Mrs. Primrose and her daughters to a ludicrous degree.

The vicar's daughter, Olivia, is reported dead, Sophia is abducted, and George too is sent to prison in chains and covered with blood, as he had challenged Thornhill to a duel when he had heard about his wickedness.

He rescues Sophia, Olivia is not dead, and it emerges that Mr. Burchell is in reality the worthy Sir William Thornhill, who travels through the country in disguise.

From chapter 17 onward it changes from a comical account of eighteenth-century country life into a pathetic melodrama with didactic traits.

There are quite a few interpolations of different literary genres, such as poems, histories or sermons, which widen the restricted view of the first person narrator and serve as didactic fables.

One of his "favourite topics", he declares, is matrimony, and explains that he is proud of being "a strict monogamist" (in the sense that he is opposed to remarriage of any sort and believes scripture allows only one marriage partner for a person's lifetime).

He tactlessly adheres to his "principles" in the face of a violent disagreement with the neighbour who was soon to become his son's father-in-law (who is about to be married a fourth time).

Of his daughters, the vicar claims, "Olivia...had that luxuriancy of beauty with which painters generally draw Hebe; open, sprightly, and commanding ... Sophia's features were not so striking at first; but often did more certain execution; for they were soft, modest, and alluring.

They both alike reflect their father's nature of being good-hearted, though prone to occasional fault; Olivia runs away with Mr. Thornhill in a rush of impetuous passion, and even the more sensible Sophia joins in with making "a wash" for herself and dressing up in fancy clothes.

In literary history books, The Vicar of Wakefield is often described as a sentimental novel, which displays the belief in the innate goodness of human beings.

The novel is mentioned in "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes" by Henry James, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Stendhal's The Life of Henry Brulard, Arthur Schopenhauer's "The Art of Being Right", Jane Austen's Emma, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins, Charlotte Brontë's The Professor and Villette, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, as well as his Dichtung und Wahrheit.

… A Protestant country clergyman is, perhaps the most beatific subject for a modern idyl; he appears, like Melchizedek, as priest and king in one person."