John Young was a Sunderland chemist. His diary was prompted by his desire to record his inner life, and the subjective passages reveal the thoughts and feelings of an early Victorian evangelical. However, his comments on his social, religious and business life are more interesting to today's reader and make his diary an interesting social document, offering vignettes of life in Sunderland in the early 1840s. Two appendices: I. John Young and pepper adulteration; II. Principles of Doctrine and Church Discipline held by the Methodists of the Wesleyan Association in the Sunderland Circuit. Market: Social history.