When we read the books a century later, the trope can seem forced, almost comical. That the Victorian reading public embraced these fanciful links with such devotion testifies to the divisiveness and the social confusion of the time. The preposterousness of the device suggests just how overwhelming the crisis really was. Dickens's genius - and the key to hs popular success - was to understand that a culture so divided against itself could only seek resolution in fairy tales. The "links of association" - all those half-glimpsed resemblances, those partial hauntings - were the building blocks of that fantasy. Their high-tech descendants serve an equivalent purpose today. Where Dickens's narrative links stitched together the torn fabric of industrial society, today's hypertext links attempt the same with information. The imaginative crisis that faces us today is the crisis that comes from having too much information at our fingertips, the near-impossible task of contemplating a colossal web of interconncted computers. The modern interface is a kind of corrective to this multiplying energy, an attempt to subdue all that teeming complexity, make it cohere. And on the World Wide Web, where this imaginative crisis is most sorely felt, it is the link that finally supplies that sense of coherence, like the families reunited at the close of Bleak House, or Hard Times, or Great Expectations. Today's orphans and itinerants are the isolated packets of data strewn across the infosphere. The question is whether it will take another Dickens to bring them all back home again.