ABSTRACT
Mr. Sergeant E.W. Cox (1809–1879) was called to the bar in 1843. He established and edited the Law Times in 1843. He served as Recorder for Helston and Falmouth from 1857 to 1868, and later for Portsmouth. From 1870, he was deputy-assistant judge of the second court of Middlesex sessions. The Social Science Association was indeed an important forum for the promotion of a good deal of institutional and legislative reform in mid-Victorian Britain. As the application of the cumulative principle in the 1870s and 1880s resulted in many controversial sentences, the principle began to lose its charms for the judiciary. In the later Victorian decades, there were outright attacks on the practice of awarding cumulative sentences, in particular to petty property offenders. The reformation of the criminal is entirely a secondary object and is properly the work of the priest and the schoolmaster. It.
