This vision of cannibalistic writers steadily carving away at the body of Samuel Johnson indicates clearly “the Doctor's” fate in the years following his death. Most immediately, it gives the reader a sense of the grimly competitive “industry” that grew up around the figure of Johnson. At least seven accounts of Johnson's life had been published even before his death in 1784, and at that point, production increased dramatically. Two new biographies of Johnson came out that very month, one in the Gentleman's Magazine and one in the European Magazine. 1785 saw the publication of William Cook's Life of Samuel Johnson and William Shaw's Memoirs of Samuel Johnson, as well as Boswell's own Tour to the Hebrides, with its announcement of a full-scale life of Johnson to follow. In 1786 appeared Joseph Towers's “Essay” on Johnson, and the first of two major texts that would stand in opposition to Boswell's work: Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes of the Late Dr. Samuel Johnson, which Boswell attacked in print, making good on a promise he had made to Malone, to “trim her recitativo and all her airs.” It was when Sir John Hawkins's “official” biography of Johnson appeared in 1787, however, that Boswell really asserted himself, not simply disparaging the work of his rivals (though he did that too), but mapping out where his own work stood in relation to these others.