Keeping letters

Source A: an original contemporary non-fiction-style account.

“When my aunt moved house, she gave me a biscuit tin containing thirty-seven letters. Most were from her sister, who had lived abroad for five years. The envelopes had dates, addresses and stamps; some sheets were folded around photographs. I began scanning them on Saturday afternoons so that other relatives could read them. It took three weekends. The hardest pages were not the longest, but those where the handwriting crowded into the margins.

A letter carries more than its sentences. One page had a ring where a cup had stood; another contained a grocery list on the back. These marks made a life around the words, a room I could almost enter but never completely know. Scanning preserved access, not the weight of the paper or the effort of unfolding it. Still, the originals were not made less precious by letting others see them. A memory locked safely away can also be locked away from the people who need it. I kept the tin and sent the files, accepting that each held something the other could not.”

Source B: an original nineteenth-century-style letter or account, written for practice; this is not an archival document.

“In sorting my father's papers, I have discovered that the letters I once considered unimportant are those I now read most closely. Accounts of weather, meals and an inconvenient neighbour seemed poor material beside his opinions on public affairs. Yet it is through these smaller particulars that his daily presence returns. A complaint about a leaking roof tells me how he sat in the room more readily than a page concerning Parliament.

I have copied several letters for my brother, but the copies do not reproduce a hurried stroke or a line added after the signature. Nor should we pretend that paper contains a whole person. It preserves what was chosen for that occasion, with silences we cannot always interpret. The proper response is neither to worship every scrap nor to discard what appears ordinary. Let us keep carefully, share generously and acknowledge where affection has supplied an answer which the letter itself does not give.”

Refer to both sources. Infer the differences in the ways the writers preserve and share the letters. Write a summary supported by details from both sources.