After education mostly by his father, he was apprenticed to a firm of booksellers in Glasgow; at the end of the apprenticeship he went to London, and entered the service of Messrs. Black & Young, publishers.
He became involved in social reform and politics, supported Polish exiles, and was one of those who wanted the Earl of Durham to lead a reconstructed radical party in parliament.
In 1840 he gave up his publishing business in Glasgow and went to Hong Kong to edit an English journal and prepare a Chinese dictionary.
This led to the compilation of the Bibliotheca Scoto-Celtica, which aimed to be a complete bibliography of books in Gaelic; it was seen in manuscript by Sir John Sinclair, 1st Baronet, in 1827.
He wrote a memoir for the Posthumous Works (1834) of William McGavin, and in 1840 published Turkey and the Turks, being the Present State of the Ottoman Empire.