The sixth chapter of the second volume of The Stones of Venice, ‘The nature of gothic’, represents the fusion of Ruskin's aesthetic and social concern; just as neither element is separable from the other throughout his work, both are present in this chapter. Ruskin came to describe it as the most important in the whole book, as ‘the creed, if it be not the origin, of a new industrial school of thought’. It made a profound and immediate impact on Burne-Jones and William Morris when they read it at Oxford. It was printed as an introduction to the men who attended the Working Men's College in London in 1854 when 400 copies were given free to the first attendants. Its most famous and influential separate publication was by William Morris with his own introduction at the Kelmscott Press in 1892.

‘The nature of gothic’ summarises and represents Ruskin's attitude to the historical past and to the contemporary condition of labour. The first, backward-looking characteristic is not Ruskin's alone. It is demonstrated in his ‘master’ Carlyle's Past and Present, in which present-day industrial squalor is contrasted with the settled and seemly administration of the Abbey of St Edmundsbury in Suffolk, and in Southey's account of the ghost of Sir Thomas More returning to harangue the age. It became almost a part of the intellectual tradition of the nineteenth century for every well-meaning critic or cleric, in revolt against the worship of Mammon, to look back affectionately to Old England. The type is gently lampooned by Peacock in the person of Mr Chainmail in Crotchet Castle. It probably reached its final and most exaggerated literary form in the work of William Morris.