This new study discusses the visual and verbal city sketches which proliferated during the 'journalistic revolution' of the 1830s and 1840s. English, French and German/Austrian illustrated serials illuminate the pivotal position of sketches in the nineteenth-century culture of knowledge and entertainment. Martina Lauster demonstrates how, as a dynamic form of cognition, sketches transformed models of visual and printed media (panorama and encyclopaedia) and of life science (physiology) into a unique kind of sociology, presenting a self-critique of the middle class on the brink of industrial modernity.

This book discusses the visual and verbal city sketches which proliferated during the 'journalistic revolution' of the 1830s and 1840s. It shows how sketches transformed models of visual and printed media and of life science into a unique kind of sociology, presenting a self-critique of the middle class on the brink of industrial modernity.