Australasia : a poem which obtained the Chancellor’s Medal at the Cambridge commencement, July 1823

A$1,250 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

[Cambridge : s.n., 1823]. Octavo, plain blue wrappers (edges chipped, label of J. O. Edwards inside upper wrapper), pp. 14; [2], stitchbound, occasional slight foxing, else very good. The Chancellor’s Gold Medal is the premier prize for poetry at Cambridge University. It was founded in 1813, and is an annual event, with each poem being on the same topic set by the examiners. Some early topics included ‘Columbus‘ (1813), ‘Mahomet’ (1816), ‘Jerusalem’ (1817), ‘Waterloo’ (1820) and this poem, ‘Australasia’ in 1823. Alfred Lord Tennyson won the Medal for his poem ‘Timbuctoo’ in 1829. Some of the rules of the competition can be found in the book A complete collection of the English Poems which have obtained the Chancellor’s Gold Medal in the University of Cambridge , Cambridge: Macmillan Co., 1859. It stated the medal was ‘to be conferred upon a resident Undergraduate, who should compose in English the best Ode or best Poem in Heroic Verse’. The rules surrounding the entry of the poems are meticulous, and copied here verbatim: The subject is given out by the Vice-Chancellor at the end of the Michelmas Term. The Exercises must be sent in to him on or before the 31st of March following, and must not exceed two hundred lines. Each candidate is to send his exercise privately, with some motto prefixed; to be accompanied by a paper sealed up, with the same motto on the outside, which paper is to enclose another, folded up, having the candidate’s name and college written within. The pape

• Binding: Hardcover

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