“Ruskin’s media” might at first sound contradictory. The art critic is known for his vehement attacks on industrialization; he promoted medieval Gothic style as a kind of antidote to modern mechanization. “Media,” by contrast, suggests exactly those developments that Ruskin dreaded, as new print technologies enabled the mass circulation of images within the modern media landscape. Yet despite the apparent contrast, this essay argues that Ruskin’s Gothic needs to be studied alongside the media objects that developed concurrently. The Gothic revival is usually studied as a high-art literary or architectural movement, but it also had a key mass media component. The essay studies three key technologies of the Gothic: the stereoview, the Diorama, and the daguerreotype. Each of these portrayed illusionistic scenes of medieval cathedrals and ruined abbeys, offering spectators feelings of pleasurable melancholy in an aestheticized and undifferentiated history. Victorian visual technologies enabled fantastical modes of embodiment and tactility, placing history within tantalizing reach. As these media commodified the Gothic, they catered to desires that Ruskin himself ironically worked to create.