Every so often someone will say, "so and so can go to Hell in a handbasket!" I have begun to wonder where that phrase originated, and Word Detective and Quinion don't have much information. They say that the evidence on this phrase is very bare, with the alliteration and the fact that a handbasket can get things done quickly being the best explanations. Apparently it has been known for most of the 20th century, though Quinion reports a similar phrase used in 1714: "“A committee brought in something about Piscataqua. Govr said he would give his head in a Handbasket as soon as he would pass it”, which, Quinion says, suggests that it, or at least phrases like it, have been around in the spoken language for a long time.

Does anyone have any information on this phrase? Is it popular in the UK?

I've always heard the phrase used more in warning, as in, "He'd better not do that, or he's going to hell in a handbasket!"

I found this article in Phrase Finder, which could get us off on a tangent with the word "tobog."

Also, you wonder what a handbasket is, because you never hear people referring to using a handbasket, but just a basket. Here's the M-W definition, which brings us full circle.

Wordmatic

Can't do any better than Quinion on this one. My mother used the expression frequently when I was little. My rather grisly association back then (in the early '50's), was with a large local store whose 'departments' were connected by an overhead line of moving baskets (soon after replaced with pneumatic tubes). The clerk would stop the motion to tuck your payment in one, then pull, and the line of pale, identical baskets would resume with an eerie whine, disappearing down into the gloom to the main floor.

re: tobog

evidently to hell on a toboggan has some history (in the sense of toboggan as a sharp decline).

OED doesn't have the term. I found the exact form as early as 1926:

Personal liberty has gone hell in a handbasket. Interfering with other people is one of the best things we do nowadays ...
Hammond (IN) Times, Feb. 19, 1926

Checking for variant forms earlier ...

EDIT: found this from 1913, which ties in with tsuwm's "toboggan":

... we'll both go down the tobog to ruin in a handbasket.
Wichita Daily Times (Wichita Falls, TX), May 07, 1913

I thought Quinion's mention of to go to heaven in a wheelbarrow, which meant "to go to Hell," was interesting. That apparently originated in 1629.