Receiving a good school education in Dumfries, he learned bookbinding there, and enlarged his experience in Glasgow and London.
1843, on becoming a free churchman, he was appointed to the editorial staff of the ‘Scottish Herald,’ an Edinburgh free church paper, and was afterwards for a short time reporter on the ‘Banner of Ulster.’ In 1846 he became editor of the Dumfries and Galloway Standard, and with a short interval, during which he edited a Sunderland paper, about 1853–4, M'Dowall conducted the ‘Galloway Standard’ till his death, raising it to an influential position.
A public-spirited citizen, he was connected with all the leading institutions of his burgh, and in his ‘History of Dumfries,’ 1867 (enlarged in 1873), he produced a most valuable record.
M'Dowall displays grace of fancy and expression in ‘The Man of the Woods and other Poems,’ published in 1844, 2nd edit.
M'Dowall's sumptuous and exhaustive volume, ‘Chronicles of Lincluden, as an Abbey and as a College,’ was published in 1886, and his last work, issued in 1888, is a study of ballad-writers, entitled ‘Among the Old Scottish Minstrels.’ This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Bayne, Thomas Wilson (1893).