The son of Robert Somers and his wife, Jane Gordon Gibson, he was born at Newton Stewart in Wigtownshire, on 14 September 1822, of English extraction on his father's side and Scottish on his mother's.
It was shortly managed with The Witness edited by Hugh Miller, whose colleague and assistant Somers became.
[1] Somers went to Glasgow in 1847, to join the staff of the North British Daily Mail; in the autumn of that year he was sent to the Highlands by the paper, to inquire into the distress in north-west Scotland after the failure of the potato crop in 1846.
[1] In 1870–1 Somers travelled for six months in the USA, investigating the effect on the economic condition of the South of the political changes introduced by the American Civil War.
[2] He became a recognised authority on monetary and commercial questions, published pamphlets dealing with banking, education, and labour issues, and contributed articles in these areas to the Encyclopædia Britannica ninth edition.