William Thompson (boxer) in 2000AD. Although Defoe is set in the seventeenth, rather than nineteenth, century, the character owes a lot to the real-life boxer, being a retired bare-knuckle fighter of note whose nickname was also "Bendy" and who famously defeated a Ben Caunt. William Thompson (boxer) William Abednego Thompson (11 October 1811 – 23 August 1880) was an English bare-knuckle boxer. Born in Sneinton, Nottingham in 1811, Thompson was one of a set of triplets named Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, after the young men in the Book of Daniel who emerged from the fiery furnace of Babylon. He was the last of
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is generally accepted that the Book of Daniel originated as a collection of folktales among the Jewish community in Babylon and Mesopotamia in the Persian and early Hellenistic periods (5th to 3rd centuries BCE), expanded by the visions of chapters 7-12 in the Maccabean era (mid-2nd century). Modern scholarship agrees that Daniel is a legendary figure. It is possible that the name was chosen for the hero of the book because of his reputation as a wise seer in Hebrew tradition. The tales are in the voice of an anonymous narrator, except for chapter 4 which is in the form