[1] The novel tells the story of Kirk Winfield, his wife Ruth, and their young son, Bill.

Bill's upbringing is interfered with by Ruth's busybody aunt, Mrs. Lora Delane Porter, who is an author of books intended to uplift the public mind.

According to publisher Penguin Books, The Coming of Bill "is the nearest Wodehouse ever came to a serious novel, although the influence of the musical comedies he was writing at the time is never far away.

"[2] In New York, Mrs. Lora Delane Porter, domineering writer of books about eugenics and germs, drives too fast and hits George Pennicut, whose leg is injured.

George is a man-of-all-work employed by Kirk Winfield, an amiable though unsuccessful artist who lives on modest private means.

Kirk's friend Steve Dingle, self-described roughneck and retired boxer who is employed as physical instructor for the Bannisters, advises him to elope with Ruth to avoid trouble with her controlling father.

Steve, Bill's godfather, wants the baby to become heavyweight boxing champion of the world and encourages this by calling him the "White Hope".

Kirk sees the truth in this and joins his friend Hank Jardine mining gold in Columbia.

Kirk hires an old acquaintance, artist Robert Dwight Penway, to teach him painting, and starts selling illustrations.

Much of Wodehouse's work combines elements of romance and humour or farce, including even the relatively serious stories The Coming of Bill and The Little Nugget.

One example in The Coming of Bill of a "typically Wodehousian" farcical remark is a quote which makes light of Mrs. Porter's views on heredity, after she drives too fast and hits George Pennicut with her car (in chapter I.1): "She was incensed with this idiot who had flung himself before her car, not reflecting in her heat that he probably had a pre-natal tendency to this sort of thing inherited from some ancestor who had played "last across" in front of hansom cabs in the streets of London.

According to writer Sophie Ratcliffe, this meant that "Wodehouse's 1914 satire on the fashion of eugenic family planning (The White Hope) was oddly prescient.

"[6] Wodehouse stated in a letter in 1964 that he got the plot of the story from Munsey's Magazine editor Bob Davis.

As Wodehouse wrote in the letter concerning the story: "It was written in 1910 in the days when Bob Davis edited the Munsey pulps and we young authors used to go to him for plots.