P1 (HL) English A Lang&Lit (Glasgow)

At Higher Level, English A: Lang&Lit candidates write a comparative commentary on two unseen texts.

This is quite challenging for many students: it requires identifying themes and features that are similar and different to both texts, and then working these into a coherently-structured response.

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Analyse, compare and contrast the two texts. Include comments on the similarities and differences between the texts and the significance of context, audience, purpose, and formal and stylistic features.

Text 1

I shall begin with my earliest impressions of Glasgow, for they are still the most vivid and reproduce, I imagine, the first instinctive response to Industrialism of anyone who has been brought up quite beyond the reach of it. Later in life we become used to things which shocked us at first, and it is impossible for an industrial town-dweller born in an industrial town to realize the full squalor of his surroundings; he could not live in them if he did, for there is in everyone a necessity to form an attachment to the patch of earth and stone around him. Yet that necessity signifies nothing more than a fundamental human impulse which has existed ever since man settled down in one place and made a home and friends; it is no argument for the goodness of any place; even some slum-dwellers have it. As I continued to live in Glasgow I therefore acquired a liking for it, and that very much influenced my later impressions of it, making me reject, partly out of gratitude, partly out of an unconscious desire to spare my own feelings, the more unpleasant ones. I shall try, for the sake of truth, to correct that bias now.

But at the beginning, when I arrived in Glasgow straight from Orkney, I had no self-protective apparatus for selecting my impressions, and was stunned by a succession of sights which I frantically strove not to see. The main problem which puzzled me at the time was how all these people could live in such places without feeling ashamed.

                                                        Edwin Muir, Scottish Journey (1935)



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- Glasgow: The largest city in Scotland.
- Orkney: A group of remote and little inhabited islands in the North East of Scotland.

Text 2

From his vantage point in Ruchill Park, Laidlaw looked out over the city. He could see so much of it from here and it still baffled him. ‘What is this place?’ he thought.
      A small and great city his mind answered. A city with its face against the wind. That made it grimace. But did it have to be so hard? Sometimes it felt so hard. Well. That was some wind and it had never stopped blowing. Even when this place was the second city of the British Empire, affluence had never softened it because the wealth of the few had become the poverty of the many. The many had survived, however harshly, and made the spirit of the place theirs. Having survived affluence, they could survive anything. Now that the money was tight, they hardly noticed the difference. If you had it, all you did was spend it. The money had always been tight. Tell us something we don’t know. That was Glasgow. It was a place so kind it would batter cruelty into the ground. No wonder he loved it. It danced among it’s own debris. When Glasgow gave up, the world would call it a day.
      Standing so high, Laidlaw felt the bleakness of summer on his face and understood a small truth. Even the climate here offered no favours. Standing at a bus-stop, you talked out of the side of your mouth, in case your lips got chapped. Maybe that was why Glasgow was where people put the head on one another – it was too cold to take your hands out your pockets. But it did have compensations.


                                    William McIlvanney, The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983)