The following is my anchor tag........
<display:setProperty name="paging.banner.full" value='<p><span id="hix-pagination"><span> <a id="id1" class="prev" href="{1}">◄◄</a>
And I tried the following using jquery but did not get any positive result.....
alert($('#id1').text());
alert($('#id1').html());
alert($('#id1').val());
You have right selector, if you have jQuery included successfully then you may need document.ready also check if you get html out of DOM
$(function(){
alert($('#id1').html());
});