He was born in Coleraine, County Londonderry, and grew up in Derry city. He was apprenticed to a draper in Belfast, and founded one of Belfast's first Sunday schools. Beginning in his early twenties, he published his poems in local newspapers. He trained as a schoolteacher with the Kildare Place Society in Dublin, and taught at Brown Street daily school in the Shankill area of Belfast. In 1817 he published his first book, The Dirge of O'Neill and other Poems, which was moderately successful. He followed it with a second collection of poems, The School of the Sabbath, in 1822. In 1827, following the death of his first wife, he gave up teaching and became a bookseller. In 1840 he founded McComb's Presbyterian Alamanac, a popular annual publication which ran until 1881.