Charles Dickens was one of the most beloved storytellers in the English language. His novels made him famous in his own time, and continue as classics in ours.      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. He would rework that terrible experience into his fiction for the rest of his life.      "He was a social reformer," 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  ."      And so Dickens wrote with great sympathy for the suffering of innocent and vulnerable   children - characters like David Copperfield, Little Dorrit and the orphan, Oliver Twist:       With his slice of bread in his hand, and his little brown parish cap on his head, Oliver was now led away from the wretched home, where one kind word or look never lighted the gloom of his infant   days.       Yet he burst into an agony of childish grief as the cottage gate closed after him.  Wretched as were the little companions in,misery he was now leaving behind him, they were the only friends he had ever had.       His first book Sketches by Boz came out in 1836. With the appearance of Oliver Twist in London periodicals in 1837, the 25-year-old Dickens became the most popular writer in England. But his first love was theater, and he considered becoming an actor.      "When he was actually writing, he became his characters," says Peter Ackroyd, author of Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion. "He would get up from his desk, go over to the mirror and mouth the words - do the expressions, grimaces  , whatever, and then laugh, chuckle to himself, then go back to his desk and write it down."      Dickens created 989 named characters, which increased his popularity. Every one of his major works has been adapted for either stage or screen. A Christmas Carol inspired more than a dozen films, from Alistair Sims' Scrooge in 1951 to Jim Carrey's voicing of the same character in Disney's 2009, 3-D animated film.      The original 1843 manuscript  of A  Christmas Carolis on display at the Morgan Library. Dickens wrote everything by hand, in tiny script, with a quill pen. Remarkably, the manuscript is both the first and the final draft, says Kiely, the curator. You can see where Dickens has changed the name of the first chapter from "Old Marley's Ghost" to "Marley's Ghost". Further down the page, he has canceled an entire section.      "He realizes he's not writing a novel, and he only has a very short time in which to write this," Kiely explains. "He's got to keep it tight, in order for it to be published in time for Christmas."      Dickens wrote all the time. He traveled with a portable inkwell and a supply of quill pens. He was working on his last novel, Our Mutual Friend, en route from France to London when the train he was on crashed.      Dickens died five years later in 1870, after a stroke at age 58. As a comic talent and a social reformer, Dickens' achievement was extraordinary, says novelist T.C. Boyle, who eamed a doctorate in Victorian literature.      "He achieved what any great artist achieves - a body of work that has entertained and delighted and instructed people down through the ages. That's what we all hope for," says Boyle.       But Dickens' greatest fiction was his own character, says Callow, the biographer: "People think of him as a cheerful man ... but he was increasingly suffering from depression and a sense of hopelessness. And that's worth knowing. I think it's always good to know that great creative individuals have their struggle, their drama." We can learn from the passage that
all the characters created by Dickens are popular people prefer films based on Dickens' novels to his works Dickens were more interested in performing than in writing the films and plays based on Dickens' novels raise his popularity