Hook was the son of the composer and organist James Hook (1746–1827), and, while a schoolboy at Harrow, he wrote the words for his father's comic operas. After leaving Oxford, he wrote farces and melodramas, ran into debt, and became a favourite wit in Regency high society. In 1813 his friend the prince regent procured him the post of accountant general to Mauritius.

Hook took to novel writing when bankrupted following his trial for mismanagement of public money: in 1817, when some £12,000 was found to have been stolen, Hook, although guilty only of negligence, was recalled, tried, and imprisoned. The success in 1824 of his Sayings and Doings, tales with a fashionable setting, each illustrating a proverb, was such that he extended their three volumes to nine in 1828. From 1824 to 1841 he wrote a series of fictional works in a similar style, notably Maxwell (1830), Gilbert Gurney (1836), and Jack Brag (1837).