Lumpenproletariat
Noun (Sociology) (esp in Marxist theory) the amorphous urban social group below the proletariat, consisting of criminals, tramps, etc. [German, literally: ragged proletariat]

By the time I moved from the outer northern suburbs to inner-city Adelaide, my understanding of literature was partially formed. I was a member of the lumpenproletariat who’d stumbled across three-dollar Penguin Classics as a teenager in the mid 1990s. From there I developed a curious passion for the modernists: Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner—the ones you could buy from used bookshops on the cheap. But I’d never read a book review; my understanding of academic literary criticism was non-existent; and I was yet to encounter a literary magazine. I had ideas about books but they seemed very private, and I had a high regard for literature, but its authors seemed otherworldly.