As an undergraduate Morris was enthralled to read the work of John Ruskin, especially The Stones of Venice (1851–53). This book would profoundly influence Morris’s thinking for the rest of his life. The Kelmscott Press would publish a chapter from it – ‘The Nature of Gothic’ – in 1892. Morris developed Ruskin’s argument that the Gothic craftsman of the Middle Ages achieved pleasure in his work as a result of creative freedom and collaborative effort denied him by the factory system of industrial capitalism. Although Ruskin’s values were deeply rooted in Toryism and Christian morality, Morris accommodated Ruskin’s ideas and simultaneously embraced socialism. In 1883, Morris told an audience in the hall of University College, Oxford that he was ‘a member of a socialist propaganda’. Ruskin, seated on the platform throughout the lecture, reportedly rose at the end to praise Morris as ‘the great conceiver and doer, the man at once a poet, an artist, and a workman, and his old and dear friend’. This chapter describes the nature of the relationship between Morris and Ruskin and considers the significance, extent and limitations of his influence.