Victorian time capsule found under a Manchester pub floor – and the letter inside sounds shockingly like a modern cost‑of‑living rant

The floorboards had already given up a handful of lost pound coins, three darts and a petrified crisp when the builders hit something that wasn’t wood. A small, rusted tin, about the size of a pack of playing cards, wedged between joists beneath the bar of a Victorian Manchester pub. No treasure, no jewellery – just a neatly folded sheaf of browned paper tied with string and dated in ink: 23 November 1890.

You expect romance from a time capsule. Declarations of love, a child’s sketch, some grand message to “the people of the future”. What stares back instead is startlingly familiar: a furious, tired, half‑funny, half‑despairing rant about money. Bread. Coal. Rent. Wages that don’t stretch. A world that feels rigged in favour of everyone else.

You could almost mistake it for a long WhatsApp voice note from a mate after their third pint. Only the spelling is better and the currency is in shillings.

1. A hidden letter under sticky floorboards

On the first page, the writer – a 32‑year‑old machinist called Thomas, if the signature is to be believed – explains why he’s writing at all. The landlord has decided to replace a rotten plank. The bar is closed. Thomas is off early from the mill and “in want of company, but not of expense”, so he asks the publican for paper and sits at a table by the fire.

He writes as if speaking to someone “who may yet stand upon these boards when I am dust”. Not to offer wisdom, but to vent.

“If you too must count farthings and scrimp on meat,” he scrawls, “know at least that I did the same upon this very spot, and swore as heartily at the butcher’s bill.”

Even across the gulf of a century, you can hear the voice: wry, stubbornly hopeful, but ground down by the maths of daily life. No talk of empire or progress. Just the price of everything and the feeling of going backwards.

2. “Bread is dear and coal is worse”: food, fuel, and the cold

Half the letter is a shopping list with an attitude problem. Loaves have gone up a halfpenny. Potatoes are “mouldy and mean for the money”. But it’s the coal that really inflames him.

“Coal is now 1s 3d the hundredweight, and still they tell us to be thankful, as though we might warm ourselves on gratitude. The children cough and my good wife says we must burn less. I ask her what then shall we do, shiver ourselves rich?”

Swap coal for gas and electricity and the rhythm is painfully recognisable. The specifics change – smart metres instead of sacks on the doorstep, direct debits instead of a man with a ledger – but the core anxiety is the same: how do you heat a home without burning through your future?

He lists the tiny economies:

• Watered‑down beer when payday is too far away.
• Bread bulked out with dripping instead of meat.
• One candle lit in the evening “and no more, for fear of the bill”.

You recognise the logic if you’ve ever:

• Stood in a supermarket debating branded beans versus own‑label.
• Switched off the heating and pretended an extra jumper is “cosy”.
• Spent ten minutes on a comparison site trying to shave £3 off a tariff.

The letter is not grand social analysis. It’s domestic accounting written in frustration. Which, in its own way, is more telling than any speech in Parliament.

3. Rent, wages, and running to stand still

Later pages move from the hearth to the landlord. Not the cheery one pulling pints over his head, but the one collecting coins at the end of the street.

“Our rent is risen again two shillings,” Thomas writes, “though there is no fresh paint, no mended stair, no new roof‑tile to commend it. My wage has not risen so much in three years. I am bid to be content that I am not turned out altogether, as though a roof were a favour.”

He notes how many hours he works at the mill – ten a day, six days a week – and how, after food, rent, coal and a small parish levy, there is “a handful of coppers” left for everything else. Boots. Doctor. School books. The odd pint.

If you strip away the antique money and the mill, you’re left with a feeling that is stubbornly current: I am doing what I’m told, and it still isn’t enough.

The details differ, but the refrain is stable:

• Then: long days, low wages, rising rent.
• Now: unstable contracts, frozen pay, landlords “testing the market”.
• In both: the shame of admitting that, on paper, you’re managing – but any surprise bill could tip the whole thing over.

You can almost hear him snort at today’s buzzwords: “resilience”, “tightening belts”, “making your money work harder”. His version is starker: “There is no more to tighten save the throat.”

4. The pub as refuge, pressure valve – and expense

One of the most human parts of the letter is the bit he nearly doesn’t write. You see the hesitation in the scratched‑out lines.

“I ought not say how much I spend here,” he confesses near the bottom of a page, “for it shames me when the children need boots. Yet what man may go always from work to bed and back and keep his senses about him? The public house is my comfort and my thief.”

That ambivalence hasn’t aged a day. The pub is warmth, light, gossip, music. It’s also £5.20 a pint, the promise of “just one more”, the tab you silently hope your card will stretch to.

For Thomas, the cost is measured in slices of meat and inches of coal. For you, it might be:

• A round that wipes out half your weekly “fun” budget.
• A takeaway ordered because you’re too tired to cook.
• A birthday gathering you can’t really afford to attend, but go to anyway because staying home feels worse.

The pub, then and now, is where people come to complain about the price of everything, including the drink in their hand. It’s also where they escape, for an hour, from adding it all up. The fact that Thomas hid his letter beneath the bar floorboards feels darkly appropriate: all that pressure pressed down under stomping feet, jokes, and spilled ale.

5. The emotional hangover of always counting

Beyond the numbers, what seeps through the ink is a particular kind of tiredness. Not physical exhaustion – though, with a ten‑hour shift in the mill, that is there too – but the mental grind of constant vigilance.

“I am never not reckoning,” he writes. “If I buy tobacco, I must subtract from bread. If a child is sick, I count not only the doctor but the days of work I shall miss. No thought is free of figures. It is as if there is a clerk in my skull, always scratching at his book.”

If you’ve ever found yourself mentally converting everything into bus fares, into hours of work, into “how many days until payday”, you know that clerk. He didn’t retire with the Victorians.

Modern life adds new entries to his ledger:

• Streaming subscriptions silently nibbling at your balance.
• “Free” trials that tip into full price if you forget to cancel.
• Buy‑now‑pay‑later schemes turning small treats into lingering debt.

The specifics have shifted from shillings to standing orders, but the psychic weight is familiar: the sense that your brain is permanently doing sums, even when you’re just trying to watch telly or fall asleep.

6. Why an 1890 rant feels like your group chat

Towards the end, Thomas softens. He admits “there are those in worse plight” – the unemployed dockers, the widows in the courts off Deansgate – and worries that his letter is indulgent. Then he leaves a final line for whoever might one day find it.

“If by some strange art these words should come before the eyes of another age, I ask only this: that you think kindly on us who strove to live decently when all was dear, and know that if you grumble likewise, you are in good company.”

It’s disarming, that last phrase. You can almost see him, ink‑stained fingers, half‑smiling at his own bad mood. You can also see yourself, screenshotting your gas bill into the group chat, captioning it “how is this legal?”, half wanting solutions, half just wanting someone to say: yes, this is mad, it’s not just you.

That, perhaps, is the real shock of the time capsule. Not that Victorians struggled – history books will tell you that – but that the texture of their complaints feels so current. The resigned humour. The counting. The tiny luxuries defended in the middle of tight budgets. The mix of shame and solidarity.

You don’t need to stand on that exact pub floor in Manchester to feel the connection. It’s there every time you look at your bank app, sigh, and think a thought that men and women in thick wool coats once thought too, by the light of a single candle:

It shouldn’t be this hard just to get by.