As usual, the world lurches towards Hell in a hand-basket. But why a hand-basket?
“Meaning:
To be ‘going to hell in a handbasket’ is to be rapidly deteriorating – on course for disaster.
Origin
It isn’t at all obvious why ‘handbasket’ was chosen as the preferred vehicle to convey people to hell. One theory on the origin of the phrase is that derives from the use of handbaskets in the guillotining method of capital punishment. If Hollywood films are to be believed, the decapitated heads were caught in baskets – the casualty presumably going straight to hell, without passing Go.
The first version of ‘in a handbasket’ in print does in fact relate to an imaginary decapitated head. In Samuel Sewall’s Diary, 1714, we find:
“A committee brought in something about Piscataqua. Govr said he would give his head in a Handbasket as soon as he would pass it.”
Sewall was born in England but emigrated to America when he was nine, and this citation reinforces the widely held opinion that the phrase is of US origin. That is almost certainly the case and, even now, ‘hell in a handbasket’ isn’t often used outside the USA. The expression probably had English parentage though. The English preacher Thomas Adams referred to ‘going to heaven in a wheelbarrow’ in Gods Bounty on Proverbs, 1618:
Oh, this oppressor [i.e. one who was wealthy but gave little to the church] must needs go to heaven! What shall hinder him? But it will be, as the byword is, in a wheelbarrow: the fiends, and not the angels, will take hold on him.
‘Going to heaven in a wheelbarrow’ was a euphemistic way of saying ‘going to hell’. The notion of sinners being literally wheeled to hell in barrows or carts is certainly very old. The mediaeval stained glass windows of Fairford Church in Gloucestershire contain an image of a woman being carried off to purgatory in a wheelbarrow pushed by a blue devil….”
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/hell-in-a-handbasket.html
