In Great Expectations, what was Miss Havisham's childhood like?

The answer to this question is found in Chapter 22 of this
amazing novel. We are not given much information about the childhood of Miss Havisham,
but what we do know can be found here, as Herbet dines with Pip and at the same time
subtley offers him instruction on how to eat now that he is a man with expectations and
has left his working class roots behind him. Note what he tells
Pip:

Miss
Havisham, you must know, was a spoilt child. Her mother died when she was a baby, and
her father denied her nothing. Her father was a country gentleman down in your part of
the world, and was a
brewer.

Thus we can see that
Miss Havisham was doted upon by her father, and having lost her mother at an early age,
was left to be brought up as a willful child, indulged in everything. The wealth that
her father made ensured that she grew up as a spoilt child. We can see this in the way
that she acts as an adult and in the way she imperiously commands others and does what
she wants. Of course, it is only towards the end of the novel that she experiences some
kind of realisation of her own faults through her recognition of the suffering that she
caused Pip.