In the book world, publishers use various tongue-in-cheek designations for what is politely known as genre fiction. “Swords’n’sandals” denotes action-packed novels about Greeks and Romans being heroic; “clogs’n’shawls” means books, usually sagas, about downtrodden but spirited northern lasses, in the tradition of Catherine Cookson; and sci-fi/fantasy novels with luminously airbrushed cover artwork depicting strange new worlds are classed as “two moons in the sky”.

Strangely enough, though, in the world of the gogglebox, the rather pallid phrase “costume drama” seems to cover anything that takes place before 1900. Maybe there are more finely tuned designations that we don’t know about: maybe Jane Austen is “bonnets’n’barouches”; maybe Dickens is “fog’n’orphans”. But as long as it’s all generally known as costume drama, we tend to think there’s too much of it about, and so undervalue it. Instead of less, we should be demanding more.

The past is vast, the present isn’t. To confine ourselves to the purely contemporary would be as constricting and parochial as limiting ourselves to the purely English and ignoring the rest of the world. While we obviously need good contemporary drama to hold a mirror to the way we live now, turning to the established, time-tested riches of English literature gives us a far wider array of stories to plunder. The primary objection to our taste for the world of bustles and crinolines, with the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate, is that it derives from our worst national vices, nostalgia and snobbery. But nostalgia is always underrated as a fuel for the cultural engine. Didn’t the Victorians’ own rose-tinted and ill-informed nostalgia, as it frequently stands accused, for the Middle Ages give us St Pancras station and the preRaphaelites? Didn’t nostalgic yearning for the classical world give us the glories of the Renaissance?

“Why oh why are we always looking back?” goes the complaint. The great Victorian novels themselves were passionate, almost journalistic engagements with the world around them, weren’t they, brilliantly documenting a changing society with wonderful vividness and immediacy? Er, well, no, not exactly.

Many of the greatest, examined a little more closely, are historical fiction, “costume novels” themselves. Dickens’s obsession with the French revolution led to A Tale of Two Cities, set some 70 years before – the chronological equivalent of a contemporary novel or television drama about the second world war. Vanity Fair is set 30 years back, Middlemarch 40, War and Peace 60. Much of Thomas Hardy’s fiction looks back over two or three generations; and even Wuthering Heights, it’s easy to forget, though it was published in 1848, takes place almost entirely in the late 18th century.

The problem isn’t too much costume drama, but too little, too conservatively chosen. What we get at the moment seems to derive from a rather prissy, constricted GCSE Eng Lit view of what’s available – hence the endless reliance on Jane Flipping Austen. Okay, Jane is astute and sometimes quite funny, and Hattie Morahan’s Elinor, in the current Sense and Sensibility, is as good a piece of acting as you’re going to see this year. But you can soon tire of the endless punani-for-property ethos, the relentlessly mercenary world she so unromantically depicts. Dickens, the other perennial staple, has a far greater breadth and depth of vision, and is more obviously telegenic, but he’s been pretty well mined out, too.

But when was the last time we had a good Wuthering Heights, in all its violence and bleakness, with a bold use of landscape and the elements to match? There’s an unspoken anxiety that any portrayal of Britain preWindrush, to be blunt, won’t have any black people in it, leading to issues of exclusion. But there’s an enjoyably wacky academic argument that Heathcliff is black – picked up as a boy from the streets of Liverpool, hub of the slave trade, frequently referred to thereafter as “that black villain”, and so on – so this, at least, would be a great role for some aspiring black Byronic scowler out there.

We don’t get enough of the 18th century either, even though the Georgians’ religious scepticism, scatological humour and generally low estimation of human nature brings them far closer to us than we are to the starched, corseted, high-minded Victorians. Fanny Hill was dully predictable, but Moll Flanders, with Alex Kingston, a while back was good fun. Why not some Tobias Smollett and a rollicking adaptation of Hum-phry Clinker? (And you’d have to admit that, yes, even though he’s about as omnipresent in the world of costume drama as God Almighty, Andrew Davies would surely be the adapter of choice again here.) Or how about Henry Fielding’s endearing Joseph Andrews,the original road novel? Even though he suffers from ubiquity as much as Davies does, you could just see Stephen Fry playing Parson Adams.

When did we last enjoy a good Trollope? The Beeb’s The Way We Live Now was great, but that was more than six years ago now, and The Barchester Chronicles, about as good as costume drama gets, 25 years ago – and there’s hardly a shortage of Trollopes to choose from. It’s not certain anyone would be bold enough to try to interest us in a Sunday-night dramatisation of George Eliot’s less than thrillingly titled Scenes of Clerical Life, but you’d have to admire the attempt.

Then we have all the minor classics, the more middlebrow stuff. There’s Emily Brontë’s spiritual heir, Mary Webb, with Precious Bane or Gone to Earth. There are numerous gripping Daphne du Mauriers other than Rebecca. And allied to them is a whole tradition of adventure stories, at which British writers have always excelled, even though they’re probably viewed with suspicion nowadays by the bien-pensants of the BBC – tainted with imperialism, and a little too suggestive of plucky white chaps battling through mosquito-infested jungles, with swarthy faces peering out at them through the leaves. But it’s high time we had a really blood-and-thunder Treasure Island, or Kidnapped, or King Solomon’s Mines; or John Buchan’s Greenmantle, about a mysterious Islamic leader and his planned jihad against the West ... Or what about Moonfleet, or the Doctor Syn books, by Dame Sybil Thorndike’s brother Russell, about the dangerous but charismatic parson-smuggler of Romney Marsh? Maybe such stuff is mistrusted as being far too old-fashioned to appeal to the kids nowadays: all goodies and baddies, chases and mysteries. What, like Doctor Who, you mean?

Along with this apparent reluctance to delve into the dustier recesses of the Eng Lit shelf, there’s an even greater, perhaps inverted-snobbish antipathy to foraging among the European classics. If far fewer people have read Turgenev than Dickens, why would they watch him on telly? But his love stories are light, funny, entertaining, melancholy and quietly compelling. Or how about some Chekhov? Why leave him to the Russians? There was a not very good Madame Bovary a while back, but that wasn’t wholly surprising. The main point of Flaubert is the prose style, the chilly, surgical tone: difficult, not to mention unrewarding, to reproduce on screen. A far better bet would be Balzac, surely – a glittering, fast-paced Père Goriot, or The Wild Ass’s Skin, that galloping, brilliant fable of consumer-ism? Or what about Candide?

Going further back, when the BBC plunged into Chaucer, it produced six enjoyable Canterbury Tales, but why didn’t we get more? Or what about a Decameron? Further back still, why should Hollywood have dominance over the Greeks and Romans? Well, we did get the egregious Rome, but it appeared to have been scripted for psychotic children with attention-deficit disorder. I, Claudius might have had wobbly cardboard sets, but at least it treated us like adults. Admittedly, the further back you go, the bigger the budget you need, but if only the BBC didn’t insist on giving all its money – sorry, our money – to Jonathan Woss, it could probably build a replica Colosseum every month.

Yet there are signs of spring. Cranford was a welcome departure from the relentless Jane, and Lark Rise to Candleford, starting tonight on BBC1, is just the kind of amiable minor classic the English-literature shelf groans with. The fact that the Beeb has been running trailers backed with a wildly inappropriate Led Zeppelin sound-track is a great sign. Next, we want Cider with Rosie with Amy Winehouse, and Wuthering Heights with Sigur Ros. Moors’n’moodiness. Bring it on.

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