why jquery not working in IE8

why jquery not working in IE8

Hi,
I am in problem with my Jquery in IE 8.
I have a script that constructs some UI dynamically with div on load.
This works fine in chrome and firefox, but in IE it does not load.
It does not log anything when it comes to second line below.
  1.     AV.console.debug("start customer UI");
  2.     e = $("<div></div>").addClass("av-webassist-main").hide();
  3.     AV.console.debug("customerUI added main container");
It logs the first debug in console and nothing after that. The page stays blank.
If I try to run the second line in console,
e = $("<div></div>").addClass("av-webassist-main").hide();    it throws error
'null' is null or not an object
I am clueless how to debug this. I am using jquery-1.9.1.js.

Thanks in advance,
Amit