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.