] I thought about this...but then I remembered that the Allens are good neighbors to the Morlands, and they come from a place with fairly limited company. The Morlands are simple people, and I'm sure that knowing the Allens to be honest, decent people was all the assurance they needed. They can be (and rightfully so) confident in Mrs. Allen's true affection for their daughter. As to Mrs. Allen's deficiencies in providing discipline or boundaries, I can only guess that the Morlands either failed to understand the danger that a place like Bath might present...or failed to notice Mrs. Allen's social ineptitude for lack of an example. I doubt Mrs. Morland had many opportunities to observe Mrs. Allen's behavior in a public assembly the size of what her daughter would encounter in Bath.

I agree. I could be wrong, but I get the impression that the Allens are pretty high up on their community's relatively small social ladder--big fish in a small pond, if you will. Mrs. Allen may be silly, but she doesn't have many peers in the area that the Morlands can compare her to. And the Allens are "respectable" in the way so many of JA's supporting characters are, in that they are generally good and well-meaning without actually being admirable.