Tealeaf: An Allegory Of The Industrial Revolution

This story is about Tealeaf’s history and how the creation of a tea making machine affected the lives of the people. The story started off with a squirrel and her grandma reading a book called The Story of Treeman. The moral of that book was how an action ended up creating monsters, very much like the history of Tealeaf. The grandma began saying that when she was a little girl, Tealeaf was prospering by hand picking tea leaves and hand making them too. But then a sly fox named Onyx made a machine that made black tea very quickly. After that, people began only buying black tea, but unfortunately that produced black smoke which was detrimental to a person’s health. As a result of this, a rabbit named Herb rallied up his friends and dissenters

The sly fox Onyx represents capitalists and inventors during the Industrial Revolution who wanted to earn a fortune from inventions and make things quicker so you do not have to pay a lot of money for a product or hire workers to make the product. How Tran described Onyx as a fox who only wanted to get wealthy and didn’t care about the consequences of his machines made him represent capitalists. The Herbites represents Luddites during the Industrial Revolution who smashed machines that were putting them out of work. In the story, Herbites were aggravated by their unemployment and the unhealthy production of black tea, so they trashed the machines Onyx made, like how Luddites smashed machines. The squirrel represents us and the later generations of the working class because we are all living in the consequences from the Industrial Revolution. The squirrel is a young child, who is learning about the past of Tealeaf through books and stories, and is living after the machines were created. She represents children like me who are slowly learning about the history of the place they live in, either through school or through stories from the elderly. The theme of this story is to teach people that though the Industrial Revolution has its benefits of advancing scientifically or increasing efficiency, it also has its negative effects on people like the working class, whom have been put out of work from the machines and