Charles Dickens — one of the most beloved storytellers in the English language — was born 200 years ago Tuesday [02.07.2012]. He was a comic genius and a social reformer whose novels made him famous in his own time, and continue as classics in ours.

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Dickens began his literary career with almost no formal education. He was born in Landport, on Feb. 7, 1812, the second of eight children. When he was 12, his father was sent to debtor’s prison. Dickens was forced to quit school and work in a London blacking factory, sealing pots of shoe polish and pasting labels on them. He would rework that hellish experience into his fiction for the rest of his life.

“He was a social reformer who knew whereof he spoke,” says actor Simon Callow, author of a new biography called Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World. “He knew what poverty was. He knew what it was to be rejected, to be cast aside, to live in squalor.”

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