The essay was published in book form in May 1849 and is structured with eight chapters; an introduction and one chapter for each of the seven 'Lamps',[2] which represent the demands that good architecture must meet, expressed as directions in which the association of ideas may take the observer:[3] Writing within the essentially British tradition of the associational values that inform aesthetic appreciation, Ruskin argued from a moral stance with polemic tone, that the technical innovations of architecture since the Renaissance and particularly the Industrial Revolution, had subsumed its spiritual content and sapped its vitality.

[7] Though Ruskin expressly disavowed any attempt to present an essay in the course of European architecture, he noted that "The reader will perhaps be surprised by the small number of buildings to which reference has been made.

[10] By the time of the second edition (1855), Ruskin had fixed his exemplars more certainly: I have now no doubt that the only style proper for modern northern work, is the Northern Gothic of the thirteenth century, as exemplified, in England, pre-eminently by the cathedrals of Lincoln and Wells, and, in France, by those of Paris, Amiens, Chartres, Rheims, and Bourges, and by the transepts of that of Rouen.The importance of authentic detail to Ruskin is exemplified in the daguerreotypes from which he made drawings of details too high to see clearly,[11] and his urgent plea to amateur photographers in the Preface to the Second Edition, which presages the formative role that photography of architectural details was to play during the next decades, not only in Gothic Revival buildings: ...while a photograph of landscape is merely an amusing toy, one of early architecture is a precious historical document; and that this architecture should be taken, not merely when it presents itself under picturesque general forms, but stone by stone, and sculpture by sculpture.

[13] Ruskin offered little new to the debate, but the book helped to capture and summarise the thoughts of the movement, proved a great popular success, and received the approval of The ecclesiologists, the influential newsletter of architectural criticism published by the Cambridge Camden Society.

Politician Alexander Beresford Hope and architect Butterfield had agreed upon the general details just a month after Ruskin's book was published and by August they had revised their plans to encapsulate the principles it espoused.

[18] In the United States, Ralph Waldo Emerson's expectations of a new, authentic American style had prepared the ground: Ruskin's Seven Lamps were quickly assimilated into the aesthetics of Transcendentalism.

He projected the transforming experience onto the narrator of Du côté de chez Swann, who describes himself as a boy reading the piece in the garden at Combray.

In Lewis Carroll's poem Hiawatha's Photographing (1857), the title of the book forms an entire line, together with Ruskin's other main works The Stones of Venice and Modern Painters.