Keeping old letters

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

I kept my mother's letters in a shoebox long after I had moved our everyday conversations to messages on a screen. The letters were not always profound. Several discussed train times, a neighbour's dog and whether I had remembered a particular appointment. Yet the ordinary details made them valuable. They preserved a voice occupied with life as it happened, without knowing which moments a later reader would call important.

When I scanned the pages, I was glad to have a copy that could survive a lost box. But I kept the originals too. A sentence squeezed into the margin told me something about the movement of her thought, and a stain reminded me that paper had travelled through hands and kitchens. I do not believe handwriting is morally superior to a message. I value both. These particular letters matter because of the person and time within them, not because all old paper deserves to be treated as treasure.

Source B: an original letter in a nineteenth-century voice. This is a period-voice simulation, not an archival document.

Dear Margaret, I am sorting the letters accumulated in my desk and discovering how difficult it is to distinguish affection from a reluctance to throw anything away. Some pages bring a friend vividly before me. Others contain arrangements completed years ago and no longer intelligible without circumstances I have forgotten. Keeping every envelope does not restore those circumstances.

I shall preserve a selection and note the names and dates where I can. The rest need not remain merely to prove that I once received it. Memory is not strengthened by making it impossible to find the few things that truly help it. Nor should a private letter be shown indiscriminately because age has made it curious. The writer trusted a particular reader. If I keep that trust, I must consider not only what I wish to remember, but what the person who wrote would reasonably have expected me to guard.

Refer to the whole of both sources. Compare the writers’ perspectives on preserving personal letters and how they convey those perspectives. Support your comparison with evidence from both sources.